The Ultimate Guide To Non-Human Identities

Introduction

A year ago, I wrote my first white paper on Managing Non-Human Identity Risks, where I shared a hands-on practitioner’s view on understanding, assessing, and managing NHI risks based on over 20 years of experience establishing and running global NHI programs at various investment banks. This white paper received significant recognition from the industry and is still considered the go-to resource for helping organizations understand the core foundational principles necessary for managing NHI risks. It outlines the key capabilities needed to manage these risks effectively and sustainably.

Writing this white paper was the catalyst for forming the NHI Mgmt Group, which is now established as the number one authority on research, education, guidance and advice on NHI risks.

Given the growing buzz around NHIs coming into 2025, I decided my first major contribution of the year would be to produce “The Ultimate Guide to Non-Human Identities“.

In this guide, we will cover:

1. What are Non-Human Identities
2. Key Challenges and Risks
3. Why Now – Why Should You Be Concerned
4. Key Research and Survey Results
5. Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs
6. Static vs. Dynamic Secrets
7. Regulatory and Audit Perspectives
8. Standards
9. The NHI Market
10. 2025 Outlook and Predictions

Initially, my intention was to also include sections on:

• How to Evaluate Your Current Risk Posture and Maturity Level
• How to Start an NHI Program
• How to Tackle the “Elephant in the Room” Using a Risk-Based Approach

While I began drafting these sections, I ultimately decided that a 70 page report was already too extensive. Therefore, I will leave those topics for my next major paper, “The Practitioner’s Guide to Managing NHI Risks“, which will coincide with several keynote talks I will be giving at major conferences this year. In the meantime, please read my white paper on Managing Non-Human Identity Risks for additional insights.

Biography of the Author

Known in the industry as ‘Mr. NHI,’ Lalit Choda is the founder of the NHI Mgmt Group (https://nhimg.org). Through this initiative, he evangelises and educates the industry and organisations on the risks associated with Non-Human Identities (NHI) and strategies to address them effectively.

A sought-after keynote speaker on the subject, Mr. Choda has managed some of the largest global regulatory NHI programs within the investment banking sector for over 20 years. He has also authored widely recognised white papers and research articles on NHIs, earning him the reputation as the leading voice and NHI Evangelist in the industry.

In 2024, Lalit further expanded his impact by forming the thriving LinkedIn Non-Human Identity Management Community Group, with over 1,500 members, encouraging collaboration and awareness around this critical topic across the industry.

1 – What are Non-Human Identities

A Non-Human Identity (NHI) is a digital entity or credential that represents machines, applications, automated processes or services used IT Infrastructure. NHIs enable machines and software workloads to securely authenticate, operate and perform tasks automatically (including access other machines, processes or services) without direct human interaction.

Examples of NHIs include API Keys, Tokens, Service Accounts, Secrets, Technical Accounts, Certificates, Admin Accounts, System Accounts.

NHIs are found in Containers, Microservices, 3rd Party Application Integrations, OT Equipment, CI/CD Pipelines, IOT Devices, AI LLMs, Databases, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Sensors …

Machine Identities – These relate to the identities linked directly to machines or devices to allow them to operate or authenticate with other machines, devices, and software workloads/processes. They typically have a Device MAC address, Serial Number, and GUID/UUID to identify the device. From a credential management standpoint, they use access tokens, certificates, root/admin accounts, etc., to operate and authenticate with other machines, devices, and software workloads/processes.

Workload Identities – These relate to the identities used by software workloads to operate automatically, authenticate, and access other machines, devices, and software workloads/processes. From a credential management standpoint, they use tokens, API keys, service accounts, certificates, secrets, passwords, etc., to operate and authenticate with other machines, devices, and software workloads/processes.

The Non-Human Identity vs Machine Identity Debate

Let’s address one of the “elephants in the room” right at the start of this report.

LinkedIn Discussion on Non-Human vs Machine

There are two main camps in the industry:

Non-Human Identity

The term “Non-Human Identity” is generally better understood by the average person, especially when discussed in the context of Human and Non-Human Identities. The majority of vendors and groups use the NHI term, although some prefer not to use a term defined by being the opposite of “human”. Some might argue there is a venture capital play here.

Some feel that describing something by what it is not, is not the best way to define a term. For example, a non-human could be an animal, but on the other hand, a machine could be a drill or a tractor as well.

Machine/Workload Identity

Organizations like Gartner, Microsoft, and Venafi are in the Machine Identity camp, which can be further broken down into:

• Workloads
• Devices

My personal view, and the reason I used the NHI Mgmt Group name, is that while Gartner’s model is good, it is not quite right. Apologies to the Machine Identity camp – hope you’ll still talk to me!

Machines and devices, to me, fall under one category, while software workloads fall under another, as they need to be managed very differently. Grouping everything under “Machine Identity” does not feel right.

• In my LinkedIn post, I argued that a machine (e.g., a server, desktop) can also have human identities. So, if a machine can have both human and non-human identities, how can we classify this entire category as Machine Identity if it includes humans?
• I hope I have convinced people that “Machine Identity” is not the right term and that a higher-level classification, “Non-Human Identity,” is probably more appropriate. Machines/devices would be one bucket, and software workloads would be another.

Our survey at the NHI Management Group found that “Non-Human Identity” was clearly the preferred term.

Are we ever going to converge on a common term? Very unlikely, but I think the industry needs to converge.

The main thing is that we all need to focus on helping customers solve their Non-Human / Machine / Workload Identity risks.

2 – Key Challenges and Risks

The NHI Challenge

Whilst the management of Human Identities is fairly mature, including the solutions to manage them, Non-Human Identities (NHIs) are very difficult to manage. As per my white paper, I believe this is probably the hardest challenge an organisation will face in terms of risk exposure.

Addressing NHI risks touches on all aspects of IT processes and controls, from IAM Lifecycle Processes (JML), SDLC (CI/CD, DevSecOps), Secrets Vaulting, Secrets Scanning, Prevent Controls, Detect and Response—many of which will require significant strategic investments to deliver the required infrastructure capabilities to support risk reduction and sustainable controls to “stop the bleeding.”

Unless an organisation already has mature controls and capabilities for managing NHIs, they are likely to uncover thousands of unmanaged hardcoded credentials in the environment (both internally and externally) that can be easily discovered or are already known. There are likely to be many credentials that have not been cycled and a sizeable percentage of legacy/inactive accounts, increasing the surface area of risk. It is also highly likely that these credentials are being used by humans to bypass Human PAM controls, potentially posing risks to the integrity of a firm’s books and records.

Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no ‘magic bullet’ here. You cannot simply buy a product that will take care of this completely for medium to large organisations with a hybrid environment. You cannot hire a few key SMEs/Consultants to quickly fix this—for many large global organisations, this could be at least a 2-3 year program and upwards of a $10-20M investment, based on my experience running some of the largest NHI programs in the industry.

The key challenges of NHIs:

• NHIs are typically unmanaged with very weak controls.
• They have high privileges and access to critical data.
• They are a key attack vector to compromise systems/data.
• It is very challenging to remediate the risks.
• NHIs outnumber Human Identities 25x – 50x.
• There is a huge secrets sprawl problem with Cloud/SaaS integrations, microservices, containers, etc.
• Significant use of NHIs by humans poses a huge internal threat that is often overlooked.
• Monitoring controls are very challenging to implement and it is very hard to see “the wood from the trees.”
• There have been significant breaches including third-party supply chain attacks.
• GenAI is going to increase the use of NHIs significantly and create bigger risks.

The Key Risks

Below is a summary of the Top 10 NHI Issues our NHI Mgmt group highlighted in an earlier article.

Watch our Animated Video on the Top 10 NHI Issues

Plain-Text / Unencrypted Credentials – Organisations often find that many NHIs have been hard-coded into source code repositories (and other places) and can therefore be easily discovered by both external and internal threat actors. Addressing these issues is a major undertaking for most organizations today.

Full Inventory of Accounts – Obtaining an inventory of all NHIs is very challenging, as there could be many platforms, endpoints, directory services, and cloud integrations where these NHIs exist.

Stale / Inactive Accounts – Due to weak lifecycle processes and a lack of visibility into account usage information, many NHIs end up inactive, increasing the attack surface area.

Lack of Account Ownership – NHIs in most organizations lack ownership information. It is critical to identify an owner for each NHI to help drive hygiene and remediation activities.

Humans Using Non-Human Accounts – Humans using NHIs has always been a problem. It is very easy for users to bypass human access controls and use an NHI account instead. This leads to repudiation issues and, in many cases, the activities go undetected.

Excessive Privileges – NHIs are generally highly privileged accounts, but we see in many cases NHIs are given excessive privileges when much lower permissions would suffice.

Lack of Credential Cycling/Rotation – Cycling/rotating NHIs is very challenging for a number of reasons, such as lack of password change information, unknown dependencies that could cause operational impacts, changes required to application code/configuration, lack of secret vaulting capabilities, and lack of endpoint cycling capabilities.

Lack of Environment Segregation – In many cases, the same NHI is used in both production and non-production environments, or the same logical NHI has the same password across each environment, increasing the risk of lateral movement.

Sharing of Credentials – Sharing NHIs across applications is a major issue, breaking the principles of need-to-have and least-privilege. This makes things like password cycling much more complex, as you don’t know all the dependencies of where a credential is being used.

Non-Complex Passwords – NHI passwords have been found to be non-complex and therefore prone to password guessing attacks.

3 – Why Now – Why Should You Be Concerned?

At the Gartner IAM summit in Dec 2024, Non-Human / Machine Identities were called out as one of the Top Trends for 2025.

A staggering 80% of identity-related breaches relate to compromised NHIs, such as service accounts and API keys, as highlighted in our 40 NHI Breaches report.

At the 1st NHI Security Conference, hosted by Astrix Security and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) last September in NY, several CISOs talked about NHI risks always being present, but previously there were bigger fish to fry, e.g., Human IAM, PAM, and Cyber defenses. NHIs are now viewed as a top 3 risk for CISOs.

Based on my personal experience running global NHI programs over the last 20+ years, historically, the typical driver for starting an NHI program has been internal incidents (including accidents using NHIs), regulatory requirements, or, more recently, breaches.

Secrets Sprawl

We have a major secrets-sprawl problem in the industry, which has worsened significantly in recent years for several reasons:

Source – Clutch Security

• Hybrid-Cloud Environments
• Cloud-Native Adoption
• Legacy On-Prem Environments
• SaaS Services and associated 3rd Party Supply Chain Risks
• API-Based Service Architecture
• Multiple Identity Providers and Directory Services
• Containerisation and Microservices
• CI/CD Automation and Distribution
• GenAI & LLMs

This has led to an exponential increase in NHIs, hyper-fragmentation, making it very hard to implement controls over this very complex landscape.

Source – Oasis Security

• Non-Human Identities outnumber Human Identities by a factor of 25x – 50x.

• I have dealt with 500k+ NHIs as part of running some of the largest global NHI programs within the financial industry.

• Most NHIs are typically static in nature, leading to huge issues and risks that we shared earlier.

• There are multiple identity providers and directory services providers that all have to be factored in across your Hybrid-Cloud and On-Prem environments.

• Particularly with legacy On-Prem environments, NHIs also exist locally on multiple endpoints (e.g., Operating Systems and Databases) that require endpoint connectivity to get visibility, etc.

• You also have to consider all your environments (e.g., Production and Non-Production) as there are issues around the lack of environment segregation, allowing lateral movement.

• A typical organisation has over 300 3rd Party SaaS integrations with limited visibility and a lack of controls on how they are managed internally as well as on the SaaS 3rd Party supplier side.

NHIs Are Very Easy to Discover and Compromise

In our view, the biggest risk around NHIs is that they are hardcoded everywhere, e.g., in source code repositories (public and internal), webpages, Confluence, SharePoint, file systems, etc., making them very easy to discover and compromise.

In preparing this report, I asked our security research intern to find out how easy it is for NHIs to be discovered in public GitHub repositories.

Dorking

We focused on a specific technique called Dorking, which exploits specialized search capabilities in tools such as application source code repositories (e.g., GitHub) or even search engines to uncover exposed secrets. These queries can help locate API keys, passwords, tokens, and more.

Dorking Query Examples – Below are some of the queries you can run to look for API keys, passwords, AWS credentials, GitHub tokens:

What Did We Find – We ended up finding a .env file in a public repository with leaked GitHub and Docker Hub secrets that were still valid and could allow the following to occur:

• The GIT_ACCESS_TOKEN can grant unauthorized access to a GitHub account, allowing an attacker to perform various actions including creating, modifying, or deleting repositories.
• The DOCKERHUB_USERNAME and DOCKERHUB_PASSWORD can allow unauthorized access to the DockerHub account, enabling attackers to pull, push, or delete images.
• With the NGROK_TOKEN, an attacker could set up tunnels to access internal services, exposing sensitive internal applications to the internet. This could be used to exploit services that are not intended to be publicly accessible.

Leaked Secrets Are Growing Rapidly

In a recent “The State of Secrets Sprawl” report by GitGuardian, a staggering 12.8 million occurrences were detected on GitHub.com in the last year alone—a 28% increase from 2022.

Attackers Are Monitoring for Secrets in Real-Time

A recent Secret Debunking research report by Clutch Security demonstrated that attackers operate at lightning speed, often compromising secrets within minutes of exposure. They simulated the exposure of 38 AWS Access Keys across 14 destinations:

66% were exploited, some in under a minute!

• GitHub: Secrets were exploited within an average of 6.6 minutes. Alerts from AWS arrived quickly (average 1.4 minutes), but exploitation often occurred faster. Scenarios like embedding secrets in .env files or Terraform state files saw rapid compromise.
• GitLab: Keys took significantly longer to exploit (average of 3 days) or went unnoticed. However, GitLab lacks integration with AWS’s secret scanning, making it less equipped to provide alerts.

Cloud API Keys For Sale

In one of our earlier articles, we reported that API keys for AWS, Azure, MongoDB, GitHub, DockerHub, and GCP were available for sale, starting from $100!

This was the message from the hackers:

“If you can think of API Key, we have it. All working. Will get new keys everyday. Have tons of working AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba keys. You can compromise whole companies with keys with high permissions. Whole cloud infra is in your access”. We have Openai, Notion, Dockerhub, SQL, Mongodb, Telegrambot and around 200 different services APIs. All fresh and working. Message me here to buy anything. Starting from $100. Minimum purchase $100″

NHI Breaches

2024 has seen an unprecedented number of breaches involving NHIs, either to initiate the breach or discovered during the breach to cause further damage. Once a hacker is in, they typically target NHI accounts, given the high level of privileges they have to critical systems and data.

We recently published a major report on 40 NHI breaches that have occurred over the last 2-3 years, with a clear uptick in reported breaches in 2024. Below, we highlight over 15 key breaches from 2024.

BeyondTrust Breach Causes Major Incident at US Treasury – In December 2024, BeyondTrust, a leading cybersecurity solutions provider, identified anomalous activities against instances of its Remote Support Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform as a result of a compromised API key being exploited. Later that month, the US Treasury announced a “major incident” as its systems were hacked as a result of this breach, with employee workstations being accessed, including some unclassified documents.

Schneider Electric Breach – In November 2024, Schneider Electric confirmed a significant cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to its internal project management system. The attacker exploited exposed credentials to gain access to Schneider Electric’s Jira server and extract 40GB of sensitive data.

AI LLM Hijack Breach – In October 2024, Permiso Security reported attackers hijacking LLM models on cloud infrastructure to run rogue chatbot services. Threat actors leveraged AWS access keys to hijack Anthropic models provided by AWS Bedrock for Dark Roleplaying.

Emerald Whale Breach – In October 2024, a significant cybersecurity incident known as Emerald Whale shocked the DevOps community. This incident revolved around exposed Git configuration files, an apparently simple misconfiguration that resulted in the theft of over 15,000 sensitive data items and unauthorized access to over 10,000 private repositories.

The Internet Archive Breach – In October 2024, the Internet Archive fell victim to a major data breach affecting 31 million user accounts. Unsecured authentication tokens in their GitLab repository, which were left accessible for almost two years, were the cause of this incident. Threat actors exploited these tokens to gain access to critical systems, databases, and user data.

Cisco Breach – In October 2024, Cisco experienced a significant cybersecurity breach related to Non-Human Identities (NHIs). The threat actor ‘IntelBroker’ exploited exposed credentials, API tokens, and keys located in DevHub, Cisco’s public development environment.

CI/CD Pipeline Exploitation – In September 2024, a security researcher demonstrated how a series of flaws in a CI/CD environment resulted in a full server takeover. The attack started with an exposed .git directory, progressed through mismanaged CI/CD pipeline configurations, and ended up with unauthorized server access.

230 Million AWS Cloud Environments Compromised – In August 2024, many organizations fell victim to a large-scale extortion campaign targeting improperly configured cloud environments. Attackers exploited insecure environment variable files (.env) in these environments.

Hugging Face Breach – In June 2024, Hugging Face, considered a leading company and AI platform, announced a security breach targeting its Spaces Platform. The incident included unauthorized access to authentication secrets (API keys and tokens), which could lead to the compromise of sensitive data and disrupt workflows.

The New York Times Breach – In June 2024, the New York Times (NYT), a media powerhouse known for its reporting excellence, became the subject of headlines for an entirely different reason: a significant cybersecurity breach.

GitLocker Breach – In June 2024, GitHub users fell victim to an extortion campaign targeting their repositories. The threat actor gained unauthorized access to GitHub accounts using stolen credentials that seemed to be acquired from previous breaches.

Snowflake Breach – In May 2024, Snowflake fell victim to a major cybersecurity breach. The breach compromised data from major organizations, including Ticketmaster and Santander Bank, highlighting the weaknesses in cloud environments when lacking efficient security measures.

Dropbox Sign Breach – In May 2024, Dropbox Sign experienced a significant security breach. Attackers exploited a compromised backend service account, which granted them the ability to access the customer database, leading to the exposure of sensitive user data, including email addresses, usernames, hashed passwords, and account authentication details like API keys and OAuth tokens.

JetBrains Breach – In May 2024, a critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-37051) with a CVSS score of 9.3, was reported in JetBrains’ GitHub plugin for IntelliJ-based IDEs. This vulnerability exposed GitHub access tokens to malicious third parties.

Sisense Breach – In April 2024, Sisense reported a security breach from unauthorized access to Sisense’s self-managed GitLab instance, which led to the exfiltration of large amounts of data, including access tokens, API keys, passwords, and certificates.

Google Firebase Breach – In March 2024, security researchers discovered that misconfigurations in Google Firebase instances had exposed over 19.8 million secrets. Google Firebase is a popular Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform used by developers to manage databases, storage, and authentication for their applications.

Microsoft Midnight Blizzard Breach – In January 2024, Microsoft detected a cyberattack planned by the Russian state-sponsored group Midnight Blizzard (also known as Nobelium or APT29). The attacker exploited a legacy, non-production test tenant account without multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Breach Deep Dive – NHIs and AI Intersections

Whilst there were many significant breaches in 2024 e.g. Snowflake, BeyondTrust etc, the one that particularly stood out for me was the AI LLM Hijack Breach given it used a breached AWS access key to hijack an AI LLM model to run rogue chatbot services for Dark Roleplaying. It shows what’s coming and why everyone is so concerned about AI security.

Overview

Whilst there were many significant breaches in 2024 (e.g., Snowflake, BeyondTrust), the one that particularly stood out for me was the AI LLM Hijack Breach. This breach used a compromised AWS access key to hijack an AI LLM model to run rogue chatbot services for Dark Roleplaying. It shows what’s coming and why everyone is so concerned about AI security.

In October 2024, Permiso Security reported a sophisticated cyberattack that revealed critical vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of cloud-hosted large language models (LLMs), such as AWS Bedrock, Anthropic, and Google Vertex AI. “LLMjacking,” this emerging threat targets AI applications hosted on major cloud platforms, exploiting their inherent scalability and computational power for malicious purposes.

In this incident, the attackers used compromised AWS cloud access keys, often obtained through framework vulnerabilities or phishing schemes, to gain unauthorized control of these advanced AI systems. Using these credentials, they bypassed traditional security measures, invoking APIs such as InvokeModel and InvokeModelWithResponseStream to discreetly hijack AI resources.

The Rise of Hosted AI Models

Hosted AI models, like OpenAI’s GPT or similar platforms, are designed to respond to user prompts in natural and creative ways. Whether it’s helping someone write a story, debug code, or answer questions, these systems are versatile and accessible. However, their open-ended design is both a strength and a weakness. AI doesn’t understand morality or intent; it responds to inputs based on patterns it’s learned during training. This neutrality makes it vulnerable to exploitation by users seeking to push ethical boundaries.

What Is Dark Roleplaying?

Dark roleplaying occurs when users co-opt AI for scenarios that simulate harmful or unethical behavior. Think of it as a twisted form of storytelling where users prompt the AI to act out scenarios involving violence, abuse, or other morally questionable activities.

Examples of Dark Roleplaying

• Simulating criminal activities, such as planning a heist or creating phishing schemes.
• Generating graphic or violent narratives for entertainment or experimentation.
• Creating fake conversations or scenarios used to harass or blackmail individuals.

What is LLMHijacking?

Imagine renting a car for a road trip, only to find someone else secretly using it for joyrides at your expense. This analogy reflects LLMHijacking, the exploitation of hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT or Bard by unauthorized users for malicious purposes. Attackers identify vulnerabilities in public or cloud-hosted LLMs, like misconfigured APIs or leaked credentials, and hijack access. Once inside, they exploit the stolen resources to generate phishing emails, obfuscated malware code, or even monetize it as underground AI services. Beyond financial theft, LLMHijacking empowers cybercriminals to scale attacks like never before.

Why do hackers perform LLM Hijacking?

Attackers hijack Large Language Models (LLMs) for several reasons, primarily centered around exploiting their computational power, bypassing security protocols, and generating malicious content.

Monetizing Hijacked AI Models

Once attackers gain control of a cloud-hosted LLM, they can resell access to the hijacked resources. This practice allows cybercriminals to monetize their stolen access. They can offer malicious services to other bad actors, such as automated content generation for phishing campaigns, crafting fake news or deepfakes, or even providing illegal material through the AI models, all without bearing the cost of operating the infrastructure themselves.

What Happened?

Initial Compromise: Credential Theft

• Access Key Exploitation: Attackers acquired AWS access keys through techniques like phishing, credential stuffing, or exploiting publicly exposed keys in GitHub repositories.
• Cloud Enumeration: Using stolen credentials, they identified accessible services, including AWS Bedrock. API queries like GetCallerIdentity helped attackers validate account access.

Probing Cloud Services

• Validation of Permissions: Attackers employed unusual parameters in the InvokeModel API to probe AI model access without triggering outright denial errors. This method confirmed the existence of active AI models without raising alarms in conventional logging mechanisms.
• Region-Specific Targeting: Knowing Bedrock was only available in specific regions, attackers tested operations selectively in us-east-1, us-west-2, and other supported regions, ensuring efficient use of their resources.

API Invocation and Reverse Proxy Setup

• InvokeModel Usage: Attackers invoked the InvokeModel and InvokeModelWithResponseStream APIs to interact with and control AI models. Streaming responses enabled token-by-token real-time data extraction, optimizing their malicious workflows.
• OAI Reverse Proxy Deployment: A reverse proxy server was established to route traffic through compromised credentials. This layer obfuscated attacker origins while efficiently managing multi-model deployments.

Model Jailbreaking

• Jailbreaking Techniques: Exploiting vulnerabilities in model prompt design, attackers bypassed AI safeguards. They used prompt injection techniques sourced from underground forums, enabling LLMs to generate explicit or harmful content despite content filters.
• Concurrent Requests: Custom scripts, often generated by the hijacked LLMs themselves, allowed attackers to automate interactions with multiple AI models, ensuring continuous content generation and extraction.

Monetization and Payload Delivery

• Service Resale: Attackers monetized their access by selling unauthorized LLM usage to other cybercriminals. For example, generating synthetic scripts or creative outputs tailored for malicious intent.
• Mass Invocations: Over 75,000 invocations were logged in a short period, almost all of a sexual nature, demonstrating industrial-scale misuse. Data was likely saved and organized for resale or direct criminal application.

Can This Be Prevented?

Enhanced Credential Management

• API Key Protection: Secure storage of access keys is paramount. Environment variables should be used to store API keys instead of hardcoding them into the codebase. Furthermore, access keys should be rotated regularly, and the least privilege access policies should be enforced to limit the potential damage if keys are compromised.
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): MFA should be enabled for all cloud services to add an extra layer of security, ensuring that even if an access key is compromised, unauthorized users cannot gain full access.
• Zero Standing Privileges (Ephemeral Secrets): Move away from static secrets to JIT secrets and transition to a Zero Trust model.

Advanced Access Controls and Monitoring

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Organizations should implement granular access control based on roles. Only authorized users should be granted permission to invoke models or access sensitive AI resources.
• Real-Time Monitoring and Anomaly Detection: Tools that track and analyze the usage of cloud services can alert administrators to suspicious activities, such as unusual API requests or excessive invocation patterns. Advanced anomaly detection mechanisms should be deployed to flag potential hijacking attempts.
• Logging and Auditing: Ensure that all actions performed by AI models and their interactions with cloud services are logged. Use services like AWS CloudTrail or Google Cloud Logging to monitor API calls, track access, and investigate suspicious events.

Secure API Design

• Rate Limiting: Cloud providers should impose rate limiting on API calls to prevent abuse through rapid, large-scale requests that might strain resources or go undetected. If a service is invoked excessively in a short period, automated defenses should kick in to prevent further access.
• Endpoint Security: Ensure all API endpoints are secured and properly authenticated, using protocols like OAuth2 or JWT tokens. This ensures that only authorized users or services can invoke models, mitigating the risk of external attackers using stolen keys.

Education and Awareness

• Employee Training: Training teams to recognize phishing and credential theft techniques will reduce the risk of initial compromises. By building awareness of social engineering tactics and common attack methods, the organization can prevent attackers from gaining access in the first place.
• Threat Intelligence Sharing: Organizations can collaborate with industry peers and share insights into new attack vectors, ensuring that they stay ahead of evolving LLM hijacking techniques.

Stronger AI Safeguards

• Prompt Engineering: AI providers should enhance prompt engineering to detect and block attempts to bypass content moderation rules. By analyzing common bypass techniques and training models to recognize them, AI systems can be made more resistant to exploitation.

Conclusion

The LLM hijacking incident highlights a critical vulnerability in cloud-hosted AI systems. Cybercriminals exploiting stolen access keys and bypassing security safeguards, like jailbreaking AI models, have shown how easily these powerful tools can be weaponized for malicious purposes. This breach underscores the urgent need for enhanced security measures in AI and cloud environments. As AI continues to play a pivotal role in various sectors, securing these technologies is crucial to prevent further exploitation and maintain trust in their use.

To sum up, based on what we have shared in this Breaches section, we hope you walk away with a clear understanding of the huge risks and exposures around NHIs and why this is something you need to address now. It is very easy for both external and internal threat actors to discover, access, and compromise your systems or those of your integrated 3rd Party Supply Chains using NHIs, the number one threat vector from an identity standpoint, with over 80% of attacks involving NHIs.

4 – Key Research and Survey Results from 2024

Our NHI Mgmt Group and a number of other organisations have conducted major research and surveys that provide a stark view of the challenges and risks around NHIs. These findings align with the view we have held for many years, that this is probably the hardest security challenge organisations will face, given that it has become the number one identity security risk in the industry.

A key summary of the findings:

• High Prevalence of NHIs – Security professionals very concerned about secrets sprawl, they outnumber human identities by 25x-50x. Organisations expect them to increase due to AI, etc., with 12.8 million occurrences detected on GitHub.com.
• NHI Leaks & Attacks – 80% of identity breaches involved NHIs, and 79% reported secrets leaks. Compromised NHIs lead to successful cyber-attacks.
• Defences Lagging – There is a lack of rotation in a timely manner, over-privileged accounts, inadequate monitoring and logging, lack of secrets management adoption, slow responses to secret leak exposure, and an inability to stop lateral movement.
• Service Accounts – Managing service accounts is a significant challenge and the biggest concern. Most organisations rely on them and are seeing increased use.
• 3rd Party Exposure – Most organisations expose NHIs to 3rd parties, raising concerns that their security practices may not align. The majority say supply chain attacks are a clear and present danger.
• Fragmented Approaches – Existing tools are not designed to address NHI challenges. Most organisations have multiple solutions and secrets managers but struggle with a unified approach to DevSecOps strategy.
• Mismanaged NHIs – There is a large number of static credentials in code, often shared via email and messaging apps. Most have excessive privileges, weak encryption, are overused/shared, and vaults are misconfigured.
• Addressing NHI Risks – Two-thirds don’t know how to fully address risks, and only 15% are confident in their ability to secure NHIs. Key challenges include discovering, assessing, auditing/monitoring NHIs. Only 6% have full visibility of their service accounts, and 20% have formal processes for offboarding API keys. Fewer have processes for rotating them, which is viewed as the most significant threat to NHI security.

• Investment – Enterprises are investing disproportionately in NHI security. NHI spending is primed to increase significantly in many organisations, including investments in threat detection and response solutions.
• Other – Breaches are getting board-level attention. AI poisoning attacks will become a new supply chain attack. IoT connections are projected to hit 83 billion by 2024 (70% in the industrial sector). Many different technology teams are involved in the NHI space, but normally security personas are the most common budget holders. Managing NHIs is essential for a successful zero-trust model.

The Full Details

High Prevalence of NHIs

• A staggering 12.8 million occurrences detected on GitHub.com in the last year alone – a 28% increase from 2022. [4]
• Half of the organisations expect the total number of NHIs to increase by more than 20% over the next 12 months. [5]

• NHIs often outnumber human identities by a factor of 25x – 50x. [1]
• 88% of security professionals are concerned about secrets sprawl, with 49% of those in larger companies being “very concerned.” [10]

NHI Leaks & Attacks

• 69% of organizations express moderate to high concern about NHIs as an attack vector. [3]
• 79% of organizations reported experiencing secrets leaks, with 77% of these incidents resulting in tangible damage to either the company, its employees, or both. [4]
• Compromised NHI accounts frequently lead to successful cyberattacks, with approximately 66% of enterprises enduring a successful cyberattack from compromised NHIs and 25% of enterprises encountering multiple attacks. [5]

Defences Lagging

• The most common causes of NHI-related attacks were lack of credential rotation (45%); inadequate monitoring and logging (37%); and over-privileged accounts/identities (37%). [3]
• Zombie Leaks – A huge 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organization is notified, showing a significant gap in remediation procedures. [4]
• The average estimated time to remediate a leaked secret stands at 27 days. [4]
• 78% of organizations aren’t confident they can stop an attacker performing lateral movement with compromised credentials. [8]

• 71% of non-human identities are not rotated within the recommended time frames, increasing the risk of compromise over time. [2]
• Only 44% of respondents are currently using a secrets management system. [10]

Service Accounts

• Managing service accounts is a significant challenge, with 32% of organizations highlighting it as a major pain point. [3]
• 57% of respondents were most concerned about service accounts, followed by 28% for API keys/tokens, 8% for Robotic RPA bots, and 7% for IoT devices. [1]
• 99% of teams rely on service accounts, but 83% find managing multiple service accounts adds complexity. [9]
• 45% of teams increased their use of service accounts and diversified their cloud providers. [9]

3rd Party Exposure

• 92% of organizations are exposing NHIs to third parties, risking unauthorized access if third-party security practices are not aligned with organizational standards. [2]
• 84% of teams say software supply chain attacks continue to be a clear and present danger. [9]
• Visibility into third-party vendors connected by OAuth apps is limited, with 38% of organizations reporting no or low visibility. [3]

Fragmented Approaches

• Existing tools are not specifically designed to address NHI security challenges. [3]
  • 58% use Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems.
  • 54% use Privileged Access Management (PAM).
  • 40% use API security measures.
  • 38% employ Zero Trust/least privilege strategies.
  • 36% use Secrets Management tools.
• Most enterprises invest in multiple solutions for various aspects of non-human identity management, revealing a lack of motion toward platform unification at this point. [5]
• Organizations maintain an average of 6 distinct secrets manager instances. [4]
• 52% of teams struggle to find a unified approach to effectively embrace a DevSecOps strategy. [9]

• While 51% of respondents use cloud provider IAM tools for non-human identities, 38.9% still rely on less secure methods like secrets managers. [6]
• Tools for Managing Secrets: Key Management Systems (48%), Certificate Management Systems (45%), and Privileged Access Management systems (44%) are the most commonly used tools. [10]

Mismanaged NHIs

• 97% of NHIs have excessive privileges, increasing unauthorized access and broadening the attack surface. [2]
• 96% of respondents reported that organizational secrets are kept outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations like code, config files, and CI/CD tools. [10]
• At least 25% of organizations cited weak encryption algorithms, exposed keys or secrets, and/or loosely managed service accounts. [5]
• 46% of service accounts regularly use weak authentication protocols (NTLM), leaving them open to credential theft and abuse. [8]
• 60% of NHIs are being overused, with the same NHI being utilized by more than one application, increasing the risk of a single point of failure and widespread compromise if exposed. [2]
• 73% of vaults are misconfigured, leading to unauthorized access and exposure of sensitive data and compromised systems. [2]
• Alarmingly, 30.9% of organizations store long-term credentials directly in code, 23.7% share secrets by copying and pasting via email or messaging apps, and 15.5% use manual spreadsheets to store secrets. [6]

Addressing NHI Risks

• 68% of respondents said they don’t know how to fully address NHI risks. [1]
• There is a significant gap in organizations’ security methods, with only 1.5 out of 10 organizations highly confident in their ability to secure NHIs, compared to nearly 1 in 4 for securing human identities. [3]
• Key challenges in managing the risks: 25% flagged auditing and monitoring, 25% flagged understanding access and privileges, and 24% flagged discovering NHIs. [3]
• Only 5.7% of organizations have full visibility into their service accounts, leaving a huge percentage of organizations with unknown NHIs. [8]
• 89% of organizations faced challenges managing secrets at scale in cloud-native environments. [9]
• 83% believe failing to secure operations at the workload level renders other security measures obsolete. [9]
• Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them. [3]
• IAM Maturity Gap: A significant 88.5% of organizations admit their non-human Identity and Access Management (IAM) practices lag behind or are merely on par with their user IAM efforts. [6]
• Only 19.6% of respondents express strong confidence in their non-human IAM practices, while 23.7% report little to no confidence. [6]
• The lack of regular key rotation is the most significant threat to non-human identity security, identified by 29.6% of respondents. [6]

Investment

• Enterprises are investing disproportionately to solve non-human identity security. [5]
• 24% of organizations plan to invest within the next six months, and 36% within the next 12 months. [3]
• Non-human identity security spending is primed to increase—a notable 83% of organizations expect to spend relatively more on non-human identity security, with nearly one in five expecting to spend significantly more. [5]
• 40% of organizations expect to increase spending on identity threat detection and response solutions. [5]
• 39% will prioritize investments in technologies designed to address visibility, monitoring, and remediation for non-human identities. [5]

Other Findings

• Policies/Standards: Only 44% of developers are reported to follow security best practices. [4]
• Organisational Management of NHIs Controls/Processes: Security personas (32%) are the most common budget holders. A diverse set of constituents across technology teams from DevOps, Cloud Security, SecOps, and cloud applications contribute to evaluating, recommending, and purchasing solutions. [5]
• Board Level Attention: 57% of non-human identity compromises definitively got board-level attention, with 37% of respondents indicating their organization’s board may have delved into the details of the incident. [5]
• Operational Technology: IoT connections are projected to hit 83 billion by 2024, with over 70% in the industrial sector. [7]
• Artificial Intelligence: 77% of IT security leaders believe AI poisoning attacks will become the new software supply chain attack. [9]
• Zero Trust: Approximately 90% of IT leaders say properly managing NHIs is essential for a successful zero-trust implementation.

References:

1 – NHI Mgmt Group – Non-Human Identity – Industry Polls

2 – Entro Security – 2025 State of Non-Human Identities and Secrets in Cybersecurity

3 – CSA & Astrix Security – The State of Non-Human Identity Security

4 – GitGuardian – The State of Secrets Sprawl in 2024 and The State of Secrets in App Sec

5 – ESG and Oasis Security – 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities

6 – Aembit – 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report

7 – Corsha – Challenges & Solutions in OT to IT Security – White Paper

8 – Silverfort – Identity Underground Report March 2024

9 – Venafi – The Impact of Machine Identities on the State of Cloud Security Native Security in 2024

10 – Akeyless – The State of Secrets Management Survey Report

5 – Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs

So what are the key lifecycle processes required to manage NHIs? Based on my original white paper, below I describe the key lifecycle processes involved in managing and securing NHI risks.

1 – Provisioning and Decommissioning

JML processes are typically quite weak in most organisations when it comes to NHIs. Static NHIs are created through many different and disparate provisioning processes, and in many cases, the credentials (e.g., passwords) are shared directly with the requestor of the NHI (i.e., a human), leading to broader issues around the inappropriate use of NHIs by humans.

• Provisioning – You will need to think about provisioning NHIs in a secure way:
  • For static NHIs, these should ideally be fed directly into a secrets vault, without any human intervention or visibility.
  • For dynamic NHIs, these are typically secure by design as they are provisioned just in time.
• Decommissioning – For static secrets, it’s important to have clear decommissioning/offboarding processes. For example, if the account is no longer used or when people have left/transferred, they may still know the credentials (passwords, keys, tokens), which could be compromised either in their new role or externally in Cloud/SaaS environments.
• Recertification – In particular for static secrets, recertification processes are also critical to ensure NHIs are still valid and required. This is further covered in the Hygiene – Posture management section.

2- Discovery & Inventory

This is probably the most important thing to focus on, especially when you are starting out a NHI program, as it allows you to understand the size of the problem and then help drive remediation activities.

This can, however, be one of the biggest challenges, as NHIs typically don’t exist in a centralised Identity Management system with a full inventory of identities/accounts. You will typically need to deal with multiple identity providers, directory services, and local accounts across Hybrid-Cloud, SaaS, and On-Prem environments.

NHIs defined in a Directory Service like Active Directory are much easier to inventory and manage compared to local accounts defined directly on a platform (e.g., on an operating system or database). Locally defined NHIs will typically require custom feeds to be built, which can take a significant amount of time and effort to develop.

Scanning – Another important aspect is to scan for plain-text/unencrypted credentials in source code repositories as well as other repositories like SharePoint, Confluence, file systems, etc. Any credentials exposed in these repositories can be easily discovered by both external and internal threat actors.

While you may be able to identify plain-text/unencrypted credentials, understanding their content can be challenging. Typically, scanning solutions will let you know a credential has been found, but it won’t tell you the context of that credential, such as what is the identity of that account (name) and where it is used (e.g., a local account on a database).

3 – Classification

Another key step is to fully classify NHIs in terms of key attributes and metadata. Once you have this metadata, you can understand the overall risk associated with the NHI based on the level of privilege and breadth of access.

• Ownership – Assigning an owner is critical to ensure there is clear accountability for the NHIs, especially when driving risk reduction and remediation activities. An organisation should not underestimate the effort associated with claiming ownership for NHIs. Many accounts may not be known to the current incumbents or could be used by other teams (e.g., upstream and downstream components). We have seen many global programs where it has taken multiple years to fully claim ownership for NHIs.Note – I see many folks in the industry talk about mapping a human owner to an NHI, but I would argue you need to map an NHI to an application/service (which indirectly has owners) as this ensures ownership of the NHI does not need to change due to personnel changes in a team.
• Levels of Privilege – Understanding the level of privileges granted to an NHI is very important, i.e., does it have full admin, write, or read access, etc. Understanding the levels of privilege can be very challenging as you may need to understand the entitlement model.
• Breadth of Access – What is the breadth of access for the account? Is the account entitled to just one asset/component, or is it entitled to hundreds/thousands of assets/components? Clearly, the more assets it has access to, the higher the risk of the account.
• Account Usage – If an organisation can determine whether the account is in use, this can drive hygiene activities to remove legacy/inactive accounts and achieve quick wins in driving down the surface area of risk. For some platforms/account types, this is straightforward as account usage data is readily available (but needs to be extracted), but for others, it is quite complex (needs to be extracted from endpoints) or does not exist.

4 – Hygiene – Posture Management

A key part of any NHI program is to drive hygiene activities, known in the industry as Posture Management.

• Excessive Permissions – While NHIs are often highly privileged, many end up being over-privileged and should follow the principles of least privilege.
• Inactive Accounts – Given NHIs typically have very weak lifecycle processes, many remain inactive and should be removed to reduce the surface area of risk. We have worked at various financial institutions where over 50% of the
• Shared Accounts – Another big issue is NHIs being shared across applications, which breaks principles of Segregation of Duties (SoD) and least privilege. Sharing causes many issues when NHIs need to be secured and cycled or hygiene activities are being performed, as you could cause operational impact by not fully understanding all the dependencies.
• Environment Segregation – Another key issue we see across organisations is the same NHI being used across production and non-production environments, leading to lateral movement risks, etc.

5 – Securing / Protecting Credentials

Remediation of NHI risks can take a number of forms.

• Encryption – Migrating away from plain-text credentials to encrypted credentials with encryption keys being securely managed.
• Passwordless Credentials – Moving away from password authentication to passwordless credentials like certificates can be another way to address security risks.

By far the most common method to secure credential risks is to migrate plain-text/unencrypted passwords to a secrets vault.

• Vaulting – A critical strategy for securing credentials is to migrate any plain-text/unencrypted credentials from source code repositories into a secrets vault. This is no small undertaking and will need to handle global scale, high volumes, and provide a resilient/fault-tolerant capability.There are various integration patterns that need to be supported given an organisation will have both strategic and legacy applications, i.e., Runtime, Agent-Based, Build/Deploy Time patterns, etc., each with pros and cons from a control effectiveness and cost/effort standpoint. Other key considerations include how credentials are onboarded onto the vault, i.e., via centralised account inventory feeds or manually by application teams.Account namespace definitions will need to be established to appropriately describe the credential type/instance being onboarded, to support future processes like managed password cycling, reporting, etc.
• Cycling / Rotation – There are many benefits to passwords being cycled as it reduces risks around transfers, leavers, mitigates/removes credential exposure in legacy code/scripts (including version history), helps uncover unknown dependencies and sharing of credentials, etc.Password cycling is incredibly challenging given the above risks—if the dependencies are not known in advance, i.e., all scripts/code that use the credential (including sharing of the credentials by other applications), there is an elevated risk of operational impact of applications breaking when a password is cycled.Cycling cannot be considered in isolation—there needs to be a sustainable solution for automating the cycling activities (manual cycling does not scale or is repeatable) and tightly coupled to an organisation’s Secrets Vault capability that needs to support cycling.

6 – Monitoring Controls – ITDR

This is one of the most challenging areas to deliver a strong and effective control, but one of the most critical, given an external/internal threat actor will always find a way to discover and misuse an NHI credential.

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all product that you can just onboard and deploy to your environment. There are challenges around the sheer volume of events, the multitude of platforms/NHIs you need to monitor, each with their own maturity/availability of metadata, and the biggest challenge by far is “seeing the wood from the trees” and dealing with false positives.

Organisations should consider Intelligence and Behaviour Analytics capabilities (i.e., UEBA tools) to develop a scalable and sustainable solution, as it is not possible or practical to look at every single event that could be a violation and instead look at outliers/anomalies as a more effective way to manage the risk.

There will be more fundamental challenges an organisation will need to deal with around why humans are using NHIs, e.g., cases deemed by teams to be valid/BAU which need to be understood, rooted out/stopped; otherwise, it becomes an impossible task to see the wood from the trees.

7 – Prevent Controls

As you mature your capabilities and controls around managing NHIs, you need to target more strategic preventative controls, including moving towards a zero-trust model. Note that many of these areas are in the early stages of maturity, but are areas you should consider as part of your overall strategy to “stop the bleeding.”

• Stop Check-In of NHIs – A key preventative control as part of a DevSecOps shift-left strategy is to ensure at code check-in time, the code is scanned for secrets and if found, the check-in is blocked.
• JIT – Ephemeral Secrets – Migrating away from static to dynamic secrets, e.g., Just-In-Time (Ephemeral Secrets) as part of workload identity management, will stop threat actors from taking advantage of NHIs.
• Real-Time Threat Protection – While many Detect and Response solutions are more reactive in nature (i.e., post-event), there is a clear direction in the industry to move towards a real-time threat protection model. Using a combination of anomaly detection and policy enforcement rules against, for example, a control plane or transport layer, they can in real-time detect and block inappropriate access. Some examples include:
  • Identity Control Plane – Monitoring, controlling, and preventing policy violations on a Domain Controller in Active Directory – as used in the Silverfort platform.
  • Workload Attack Surface Protection – Another emerging technique that can be considered is to leverage Mutual TLS (mTLS), a security protocol typically used to authenticate between processes/workloads. This combined with actual NHI tracking/usage/discovery, anomaly detection techniques, and policy enforcement rules can help detect and block unknown or inappropriate access – as used in the TrustFour platform.

6 – Static vs. Dynamic Secrets

As we have stated earlier in our research report, the main root cause of the issues and risks associated with NHIs is due to the fact that the vast majority today are static in nature. There is a lot of talk in the industry at the moment around Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP), Ephemeral Just-In-Time (JIT) Secrets, and Zero Trust.

Static Secrets – Long-lived credentials that remain unchanged for extended periods.

• Advantages: Simple to implement and integrate, compatible with legacy systems, and require minimal computational resources.
• Issues: High security risks due to long-term exposure. If compromised, attackers can gain indefinite access. Difficult to audit and track due to widespread distribution.
• Mitigation: Remove hard-coded credentials from source code; use centralized secrets vaults; rotate secrets regularly; remove inactive accounts to reduce the surface area of risk.

Dynamic Secrets – Short-lived, automatically generated credentials that provide temporary access to resources.

• Advantages: Enhanced security due to short lifespan, reducing the risk of unauthorized access. Supports zero-trust principles through zero-standing privileges (ZSP).
• Issues: More complex and costly to implement and manage compared to static secrets; outage risks given high availability dependency on identity issuing systems; maturing space; many legacy systems cannot support dynamic secrets.
• Mitigation: Use automated tools and platforms for generating and managing dynamic secrets.

Whilst everyone will agree that moving to dynamic ephemeral secrets is where we need to be heading as an industry, in practice, it is not that simple for a number of reasons:

• The approach, standards, and solutions around a zero-trust model for NHIs are maturing.
• For most organisations, this is likely to be a massive undertaking and investment.
• Given the huge secrets sprawl problem, hyper fragmentation, legacy platforms, products, and many 3rd party external dependencies, this is not something that can be implemented enterprise-wide, given the differing levels of maturity across the industry.

Organisations will need to take a balanced approach, focusing on getting control of their current risk exposure using a risk-based approach, while looking at strategic solutions and capabilities to stop the bleeding.

Comparison of Static Secrets vs Dynamic Secrets – Source Entro Security

7 – Regulatory and Audit Perspective

Having worked in the Financial Industry for over 30 years, I have been at the coalface, engaging and dealing with all the major regulators and external auditors (PWC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG) around the world in the NHI/IAM/PAM areas.

• US – Federal Reserve (FED)
• HK – Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA)
• SG – Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)
• UK – Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
• IN – Reserve Bank of India (RBI)
• CH – Swiss Financial Market Supervision Authority (FINMA)

With respect to regulatory and audit focus on NHIs, I can say the focus has increased substantially over the last 2-3 years. In particular, if you are in the financial industry and don’t have a program to manage NHI risks at the moment, you could get caught out very soon. We strongly urge you to get in front of this, as dealing with a regulatory program around NHIs will hit you very hard indeed from an investment and risk mitigation standpoint.

Previously, regulators and auditors focused on human controls, looking at things like Privileged Access Management (PAM), Developer Access to Production, and Segregation of Duties (SoD).

In recent years, I have personally seen that both regulators and auditors have started asking very specific questions around the controls you have in place for NHIs. A number of them, as part of broader industry-wide cyber threat assessment exercises, perform red-team exercises that regularly end up identifying NHI risks, particularly around hardcoded/unencrypted credentials in source code.

At a high level, the key controls they have been asking about are:

• Plain-text/unencrypted credentials in source code and other repositories.
• Cycling/rotation of credentials.
• Monitoring controls, e.g., detecting inappropriate access, particularly humans using NHIs.

Most organisations are likely to have very weak or no controls around these areas, and it is very easy for regulators and auditors to identify these security weaknesses, particularly around hardcoded / unencrypted credentials, as these are very easy to discover and likely exist in every organisation.

Key Regulations and their NHI Impact

Below are some of the key regulations that exist in the industry today, which have significant implications for managing NHIs within an organisation:

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) – Requires publicly traded companies to implement internal controls to ensure the accuracy and integrity of financial reporting. This includes testing and documenting evidence of these controls regularly, in some cases every quarter.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) – Has long served as the foundation for organizations handling payment card data, ensuring robust security measures are in place to protect sensitive information. The release of PCI DSS version 4.0 on March 31, 2022, marked a significant evolution in the standard, introducing requirements and emphasizing areas that were previously under-addressed.

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) – A regulation introduced by the European Union to strengthen IT security frameworks across the financial sector. With the introduction of DORA, financial institutions are now required to follow stringent guidelines for safeguarding against Information and Communication Technology (ICT) related incidents. These include measures for protection, detection, containment, recovery, and repair. DORA explicitly targets ICT risks, introducing clear rules for ICT risk management, incident reporting, operational resilience testing, and oversight of ICT third-party risks.

ISO/IEC 27001 – This international standard provides a framework for information security management systems (ISMS). It helps organizations manage the security of assets such as financial information, intellectual property, employee details, and information entrusted by third parties. Non-human identities, such as digital certificates and API keys, fall under the scope of this standard.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – Applies to the European Union and has significant implications for non-human identities. While it primarily focuses on personal data protection, it also impacts how organizations manage data generated by automated systems, such as AI and IoT devices. Organizations must ensure transparency and accountability in their data processing activities, regardless of whether the data pertains to human or non-human identities.

SOC 2 (System and Organization Controls 2) – A cybersecurity framework developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). It focuses on protecting customer data and ensuring that organizations follow best practices in information security. SOC 2 compliance is achieved through an audit that evaluates an organization’s controls based on five Trust Service Criteria (TSC): Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy. Non-human identities need to be properly secured and monitored to ensure processing integrity and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive and personal data.

Regulatory Deep Dives

Deep Dive 1 – SOX

Non-human identities (NHIs), such as service accounts, bots, and automated processes, play a crucial role in these controls. Given SOX is concerned about the impact on books and records, based on my experience, the focus is typically on NHIs with “write” privileges.

Whilst I don’t believe there is a formal set of requirements specifically on NHIs, they are covered in a broader set of IT controls. The key ones relevant to NHIs are listed below, with my interpretation of what I believe they mean from an NHI standpoint:

Access Management Controls

• Strong password policies, including cycling/rotation for NHIs
• JML processes, including access reviews and revocation processes for NHIs

Segregation of Duties (SoD) & Least Privilege

• Segregation of NHIs across environments to prevent lateral movement
• Separate NHIs for each application
• Ensuring NHIs only have the permissions required to perform their duties

Audit Logs and Monitoring

• Ability to monitor the inappropriate use of NHIs to impact books and records

Privilege Access

• Ensure humans are not using NHIs to bypass human PAM controls

Change Management Controls

• Ensure NHIs are not used to bypass change management controls

SoX is probably one of the oldest regulations in the industry and something I have had to deal with on numerous occasions at various global investment banks. Below, I share two real-life examples of dealing with SOX/Audit control requirements over 20 years ago and how they are still very relevant today.

Example 1: My first exposure to SOX was over 25 years ago at an investment bank within the Equities division, dealing with the opposite of the secrets sprawl problem, as you can see in my article Who Says We Have a Secrets Sprawl Problem.

Within the Equities division, we had just one Solaris Technical Account (NHI) that was used to run the entire equities infrastructure and applications, including production and non-production (covering approximately 1,000 applications), and approximately 1,000 staff had sudo (su) impersonation access rights to this technical account. This was flagged as a major Segregation of Duties (SoD) issue, so what did we do?

• Each application ended up having its own set of NHIs.
• We segregated NHIs—one per environment to prevent lateral movement between environments.
• Each account had an environment postfix, e.g., trading_prod, trading_qa, trading_dev.

Unfortunately, 25 years on, the world has not changed much and has instead gotten worse with the huge secrets sprawl problem we now see:

• Many NHI credentials are still shared across environments.
• Many NHI credentials are still shared across applications.
• Many plain-text/unencrypted credentials are found in source code repositories.
• Organisations are still struggling to rotate/cycle NHI credentials.

Example 2: My second exposure to SOX was over 20 years ago at the same investment bank, where there was a key SOX control requirement around ensuring production database technical accounts (NHIs) with “write” privileges had their passwords cycled every 180 days.

This ended up becoming a major challenge for a number of reasons:

• Passwords were hardcoded in application source code.
• Cycling a password would require coordinating updates in many scripts, with a huge risk of operational impact if all the dependencies were not understood.
• Credentials were shared across applications, making cycling more challenging.
• No password vault solutions really existed in those days.

As a result, application teams struggled to meet this control requirement on a quarterly basis, and it became a major SOX control issue for the organisation. I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to end up having to run a huge global program to mitigate the risk exposure.

• One of my claims to fame many years ago was that I built a rudimentary password vault-type solution that allowed teams to remove hardcoded passwords from their scripts and deal with complex challenges of resiliency, dealing with staggered password changes through retry logic to first try the new password then the old password, etc. It’s scary to see that 20 years on, some of the major vault solutions don’t even offer some of these capabilities!
• Given the SOX focus was on database technical accounts with “write” privileges, we decided to focus on over-privileged accounts. By leveraging usage metadata available on Sybase databases, we found that over 80% of the database accounts that had “write” privileges were actually only performing “read” actions and were therefore over-privileged. I ended up devising a common “read” and “write” metadata model on all of our databases, and our team went on to migrate thousands of NHI accounts from “write” to “read” privileges. By doing this huge hygiene exercise, we were able to massively reduce the surface area of risk and the requirement to cycle passwords of DB technical accounts with “write” privileges.

A number of years later, a huge Regulatory audit flagged major issues with environment segregation, which also covered control issues around NHIs. The cycling/rotation problem now manifested itself company-wide. I ended up running a huge global IT regulatory program, including dealing with the password cycling challenge. Based on what we had done a few years earlier within the Equities division, I educated our C-Level execs on the huge challenges with rotating passwords regularly on databases.

• We did a rinse and repeat exercise, looking for over-privileged “write” accounts and converted many to “read” thus reducing the surface area of risk and cycling requirements significantly.
• We also looked at “inactive” accounts on our Sybase databases. After developing a global solution to collect and assess millions of database accounts on thousands of databases across production and non-production, we identified over 1 million accounts (yes, one million accounts, both human and non-human) that appeared inactive. Over 18 months, we drove a huge hygiene program to delete these accounts, which also massively reduced the surface area of risk and requirements to cycle passwords.
• The final recommendation I made was to move away from password authentication and instead use passwordless Kerberos authentication to connect to Sybase DBs. This again became a massive global undertaking, with millions of dollars spent upgrading, migrating, and deploying application code to support Kerberos authentication. The earlier work we did to remove inactive accounts not only reduced the surface area of risk but also significantly reduced the number of accounts we had to move to Kerberos authentication.

It is scary to see that 20 years on, we still have all these issues, but now the challenge is significantly worse due to the huge secrets sprawl problem we have described earlier.

Deep Dive 2 – PCI-DSS

The release of PCI DSS version 4.0 on March 31, 2022, marked a significant evolution in the standard, introducing requirements and emphasizing areas that were previously under-addressed. One such critical area is the management of Non-Human Identities—service accounts, application accounts, APIs, and automated scripts that interact with cardholder data environments (CDE) or critical systems.

In a conversation with Vincenzo Iozzo, CEO at SlashID, he delves into the specific challenges companies face regarding non-human identities in PCI DSS v4.0 and explores strategies to overcome them. Full details can be found in his blog post.

PCI DSS v4.0 introduces several new mandates aimed at enhancing the security of non-human identities:

• Unique Identification: Each non-human entity must have a unique ID to ensure accountability (Requirement 8.2.2).
• Secure Authentication: Strong authentication methods must be implemented, avoiding hard-coded passwords (Requirement 8.6).
• Credential Management: Authentication credentials must be securely managed and rotated regularly (Requirement 8.3.5).
• Least Privilege Access: Access rights should be limited to the minimum necessary (Requirement 7.1).
• Regular Review and Deprovisioning: Access rights must be periodically reviewed, and unnecessary accounts removed (Requirements 7.2.5 and 8.1.4).
• Monitoring and Logging: Activities of non-human accounts must be logged and monitored (Requirement 10.2.1).
• Secure Transmission: Credentials must be transmitted using strong cryptography (Requirement 8.5.1).
• Cryptographic Key Protection: Cryptographic keys must be securely managed (Requirement 3.5).
• Avoid Hard-Coded Credentials: Hard-coded passwords in code or scripts are prohibited (Requirement 8.6.1).
• Segregation of Duties: Non-human accounts must not have conflicting responsibilities (Requirement 10.4.1).

The Challenges Companies Are Facing meeting PCI DSS requirements:

1. Identifying and Managing Non-Human Accounts – Many organizations lack a comprehensive inventory of non-human accounts, which proliferate in complex IT environments. Without unique identification, accountability and traceability are difficult, increasing risks of unauthorized access and non-compliance.
2. Eliminating Hard-Coded Credentials – Hard-coded credentials in scripts and applications are commonly used for convenience but pose significant security risks. Embedded credentials are prone to exposure, violating PCI DSS requirements.
3. Implementing Strong Authentication Methods – Legacy systems may not support modern authentication mechanisms like API tokens or certificates. Outdated methods weaken security and hinder compliance.
4. Secure Credential Management and Rotation – Manual credential management is time-consuming and error-prone. Infrequent rotation and insecure storage increase breach risks.
5. Enforcing Least Privilege Access – Non-human accounts often have broad permissions for operational ease. Over-privileged access increases risk and violates the principle of least privilege.
6. Regular Review and Deprovisioning of Accounts – Tracking access rights for all non-human accounts is difficult without automation. Orphaned or unnecessary accounts create vulnerabilities.
7. Comprehensive Monitoring and Logging – Existing logging systems may not capture non-human account activities across platforms. Insufficient monitoring delays incident detection and response.
8. Secure Transmission of Credentials – Ensuring secure credential transmission in mixed legacy and modern environments is challenging. Unsecured transmission can result in breaches and compliance failures.
9. Protecting Cryptographic Keys – Securely managing cryptographic keys throughout their lifecycle requires specialized tools. Compromised keys can lead to unauthorized decryption of sensitive data.

Conclusion

Meeting PCI DSS v4.0 requirements for Non-Human Identities is complex but essential. A strategic approach, combining audits, automated tools, and robust policies bridges the technology gaps and strengthens security. By prioritizing these efforts, organizations can achieve compliance and bolster their overall security posture.

8 – Standards

One thing that is very clear and evident from our report is that managing NHIs is not a mature discipline. Given the complexity of dealing with Non-Human / Machine / Workload Identities, a number of standards have evolved or are starting to evolve, primarily in the space of Zero Trust, covering Just-In-Time (JIT) ephemeral credentials for Workload Identity Management. These standards collectively aim to enhance the security, efficiency, and interoperability of Non-Human Identities.

Below we share a number of the key standards that exist or are evolving:

SPIFFE/SPIRE – spiffe.io

SPIFFE (Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone) and SPIRE (SPIFFE Runtime Environment) is a set of open-source standards for providing secure, cryptographic identities to workloads across various platforms.

• SPIFFE: Defines a framework and set of standards for identifying and securing communications between application services. It aims to provide strongly attested, cryptographic identities to workloads.
• SPIRE: A production-ready implementation of the SPIFFE APIs. It performs node and workload attestation to securely issue SPIFFE IDs (SVIDs) to workloads and verify the SVIDs of other workloads.
• Use Cases: SPIFFE and SPIRE are used for secure microservices communication, cross-service authentication, and bridging the gap between different platforms like Kubernetes.
• Benefits: They enable defense in depth, reduce operational complexity, and ensure consistent, automated management of identity.

WIMSE (Web Infrastructure Machine Security Ecosystem, IETF) – ietf.org

WIMSE is an emerging standard being developed by an IETF working group that enhances the security of machine identities and communications over the web. It aims to standardize protocols for secure machine authentication and communication, ensuring that machine identities are managed and verified securely in web-based environments. WIMSE focuses on fine-grained access control across platforms in public and private clouds.

The WIMSE working group focuses on:

• Propagation, representation, and processing of workload identities.
• Authentication and authorization for software workloads in various runtime environments.
• Managing complex contexts, such as user identity, software origin, and hardware-based attestation.

SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments, IETF) – ietf.org

SPICE is an IETF initiative to simplify and secure communication between isolated computing environments. It facilitates secure machine-to-machine communication in multi-tenant and cloud-native architectures by providing a protocol for remote access to virtual environments. SPICE ensures that data channels are encrypted and authenticated, enhancing the security of remote interactions.

OpenID Connect Adaptations for M2M Authentication (OpenID Foundation) – cncf.io

OpenID Connect for M2M Authentication extends the OpenID Connect protocol to support authentication between machines, devices, or applications without human intervention. Here are some key points:

• Secure Authentication: Ensures that machines can securely authenticate each other using tokens and credentials, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
• Interoperability: Promotes interoperability between different systems and applications, making it easier to integrate and manage M2M authentication.
• Use Cases: Common use cases include automated processes, IoT devices, microservices, and cloud-native applications that need to securely communicate and access resources without human involvement.

FDO (FIDO Device Onboarding) – fidoalliance.org

FIDO Device Onboarding (FDO) is an automatic onboarding protocol developed by the FIDO Alliance for edge nodes and IoT devices. Here are some key points:

• Automatic Onboarding: FDO automates the process of installing secrets and configuration data into a device, enabling it to securely connect and interact with cloud and edge management platforms.
• Zero-Touch Provisioning: FDO supports zero-touch provisioning, meaning devices can be onboarded without manual intervention.
• Late Binding: Devices can be manufactured identically and then “late bound” to a specific management platform using a digital proof of ownership called an “Ownership Voucher.”
• Security: FDO ensures secure onboarding by cryptographically verifying device ownership and authenticating devices.
• Flexibility: The protocol supports a wide range of processors and operating systems, making it versatile for various applications.

FDO is designed to simplify and secure the deployment of edge and IoT devices at scale, providing a robust solution for managing device lifecycles.

SPIFFE/SPIRE – Deep Dive

The SPIFFE/SPIRE framework is probably one of the most mature frameworks for workload identity management, and a number of vendors and organisations have started to adopt this framework.

The SPIFFE (Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone) and SPIRE (SPIFFE Runtime Environment) open-source projects provide a comprehensive framework and runtime environment for managing identities in a cloud-native ecosystem.

What is SPIFFE?

SPIFFE, short for Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone, is an open standard for securely authenticating software services in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. It provides a set of specifications for identifying and verifying workloads in a standardized manner.

Key Features of SPIFFE:

• Universal Identity Management: SPIFFE provides a consistent identity format across different environments, such as on-premises, cloud, or hybrid setups.
• Workload Authentication: By using SPIFFE IDs, workloads can authenticate each other without relying on IP addresses or DNS names, which can be mutable and insecure.
• Interoperability: SPIFFE ensures interoperability across various platforms and technologies, promoting a unified approach to identity management.

How SPIFFE Works:

At the heart of SPIFFE is the SPIFFE ID, a unique identifier assigned to each workload. These IDs are presented as URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers), which follow a standard format, making them universally recognizable. Workloads use SPIFFE IDs to establish mutual TLS (mTLS) connections, ensuring secure and encrypted communications.

Introducing SPIRE:

SPIRE, or SPIFFE Runtime Environment, is the reference implementation of SPIFFE. It provides the necessary infrastructure and runtime components to implement SPIFFE specifications in real-world environments.

Key Features of SPIRE:

• Dynamic Registration: SPIRE supports the dynamic registration of workloads, making it suitable for environments where services are constantly scaling up or down.
• Pluggable Architecture: SPIRE’s architecture is highly extensible, allowing it to integrate with various authentication backends and data stores.
• Workload Attestation: SPIRE ensures that only verified workloads are assigned SPIFFE IDs through an attestation process, which can include factors such as workload identity, hardware security modules (HSMs), and cloud provider metadata.

How SPIRE Works:

SPIRE consists of two main components:

• SPIRE Server: This is the control plane, responsible for issuing and managing SPIFFE IDs. It handles workload registrations, policies, and attestation mechanisms.
• SPIRE Agent: This is the data plane, deployed alongside workloads. It fetches and renews SPIFFE IDs and handles the local attestation of workloads.

The interaction between SPIRE Server and SPIRE Agent ensures that workloads are dynamically identified and authenticated, maintaining a secure and scalable identity management system.

Benefits of SPIFFE and SPIRE:

• Enhanced Security: By decoupling identity from underlying infrastructure, SPIFFE and SPIRE reduce the risk of identity spoofing and other attacks.
• Scalability: Suitable for cloud-native environments, they support dynamic scaling and microservices architectures.
• Interoperability: Ensures consistent identity management across diverse environments and technologies.
• Reduced Complexity: Simplifies identity management by providing a standardized approach, reducing the need for custom solutions.

Real-World Applications:

• Microservices Security: Ensuring secure communication between microservices in a Kubernetes environment.
• Zero Trust Architectures: Implementing zero trust principles by verifying and authenticating every workload and service request.
• Hybrid Cloud Environments: Managing identities across hybrid cloud setups seamlessly, ensuring consistent security policies.

Getting Started with SPIFFE and SPIRE:

To begin with SPIFFE and SPIRE, start by exploring the official SPIFFE and SPIRE documentation.

Conclusion:

SPIFFE and SPIRE offer a robust framework for managing identities in modern IT infrastructures. By providing standardized and secure identity management, they help organizations enhance security, streamline operations, and adapt to the dynamic nature of cloud-native environments. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, adopting solutions like SPIFFE and SPIRE will be crucial for maintaining secure and resilient IT systems.

9 – The NHI Market

Investment and Growth in the Non-Human Identity Market Have Exploded in the Last 12-18 Months

The first main batch of NHI vendors started to appear in the market approximately 3 years ago (although a few appeared even earlier).

The last 18 months have seen an explosion in vendors entering this space, given the recognition in the industry of NHI risks and the lack of available solutions to solve this hugely complex problem.

Why the Huge Growth in NHI Products in Recent Years?

Based on what we have stated in our report, managing NHI risks is probably the most complex challenge in the industry today, and the current set of solutions are not fit for purpose to handle the complex set of requirements for managing NHI risks.

Source: Oasis Security original diagram, overlaid by Francis Odum to include key Vendors and further overlaid by our NHI Mgmt Group to include a missing piece around Secret Scanning solutions

As stated by Francis Odum in his “The Complete Guide to the Growing Impact of NHIs in Cybersecurity” report, some organizations have tried to utilize some form of CIEM, PAM, Secrets Manager, and PKI/Cert Mgmt integrations to manage aspects of their NHI challenge. This results in custom in-house solutions and processes to deal with the issue. Based on the current fragmented identity ecosystem, where no one solution solves the problem, it is clear that the industry requires a comprehensive set of solutions.

A Practitioner’s View

Having run one of the largest NHI programs in the financial industry recently, I can fully attest to this. When starting the program a few years ago, NHI products did not exist in the market, so we had to build our own in-house capabilities, covering:

• Inventory Management – In-house built.
• Ownership/Claiming Processes – In-house built.
• Secrets Scanning – Vendor solution with in-house extensions and processes, e.g., to deal with the challenges of false positives and being able to apply context to the scan results.
• Secrets Vault Solution – Vendor solution with in-house extensions and processes and guidelines to deal with all the different use cases.
• Prevent Controls – Vendor solution to stop the check-in of secrets into source code.
• CI/CD Integration – In-house built with secrets vault integration and source code prevent controls.
• Cycling Capabilities – In-house built, very challenging to build as it needed to integrate cycling capabilities into each endpoint platform into the vault solution, etc.
• Hygiene Processes – In-house built to deal with inactive accounts, environment segregation issues, etc.
• User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) Detect and Response – In-house built, using a vendor UEBA product, but very challenging to implement given the number of endpoints, sheer volume of events, and false positives.

Make no mistake, this was a massive undertaking, spanning multiple years and tens of millions in investment and remediation activities.

Question: If NHI products existed when you started the program, would you have used them?

• Answer: Absolutely.

Question: Would they have solved all your requirements?

• Answer: No.
• Why – While the NHI products have matured significantly in recent years, they still need to mature further to meet the full set of requirements, particularly for large multinational organisations that have hyper-fragmented environments, especially their legacy On-Prem footprint.

Question: Would they help fix the issues quickly?

• Answer: No.
• Why – While the NHI products can help significantly accelerate your understanding of the current exposure with inventory management and help reduce risk exposure through posture management, remediating the risks identified, such as plain-text/unencrypted credentials in source code and cycling/rotation, is still a massive undertaking.

What types of NHI solutions have emerged:

Pure Non-Human Identity products

• Core Lifecycle Capabilities: Focus mainly on dealing with static secrets, the core lifecycle processes of discovery and inventory management, including scanning, classification/ownership, posture management (hygiene), remediation (vaulting, cycling), and ITDR (detect and response).
• Advanced Lifecycle Capabilities: Support prevnenting check-in of secrets, the zero-trust model of Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP) using Just-In-Time ephemeral secrets, real-time threat detection and prevention.

In addition, we have seen:

• Combined Human/Non-Human Identity products
• Existing IGA/PAM solutions that are now adding broader NHI lifecycle capabilities.
• Cloud-focused solutions.
• SaaS-focused solutions.
• Solutions that perform a specific function, e.g., secrets scanning, detect and response.

Over time, it is very clear we will see convergence of these capabilities within the solutions.

Who Will Be The Winners? – The vendors who can provide these combined capabilities, support a zero-trust model, deal with the huge challenge around on-prem environments, and offer significantly faster ways to remediate and get the risks under control, e.g., through real-time threat detection and prevention, will likely be the winners in the market.

Market Activity – There were some major acquisitions in 2024 showing the importance of the Non-Human / Machine Identity market overall.

• In May 2024, privileged access management (PAM) vendor CyberArk signed an agreement to acquire machine identity management company Venafi for $1.54 billion.
• In November 2024, Silverfort acquired Resonate with the goal of consolidating the offerings to protect identities across all on-prem assets, cloud identity providers, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS applications.

We also expect more of the heavyweights in the identity market to enter the NHI space (some already are), including possibly:

• Identity Providers (Microsoft, Google, IBM, Okta, …)
• PAM/Secrets Vault Providers (HashiCorp, BeyondTrust, Delinea, CyberArk, …)
• IGA Providers (Saviynt, SailPoint, Veza, …)
• PKI/Cert Providers (Venafi, KeyFactor, …)
• CIAM/SSPM Providers (Wiz, Axonius, Zscaler, Netskope, Obsidian, …)

Expect major acquisitions and consolidation, including within the existing NHI product companies themselves, during 2025 and beyond.

Our NHI Mgmt Group is strategically placed to provide deep insights into the market and the vendors, given our experience in running some of the largest NHI programs in the industry and having strategic partnerships with close to 20 vendors in the NHI space, all helping support our mission statement to educate and evangelize around the huge NHI risks and support organizations in their journey to get these huge exposures under control.

Expected Growth in the Non-Human Identity Market

While the NHI market is difficult to assess at the moment, here are some key data points indicating where the NHI market is heading:

• According to PrecisionReports, the global machine identity management market size was valued at USD 1.2 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 12.25% during the forecast period, reaching USD 2.4 billion by 2027.

• According to Verified Market Reports, the machine identity and credential management market size was valued at USD 1.5 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach USD 5.8 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 18.7% from 2024 to 2030. Clearly, this is a broader scope than just Non-Human / Machine Identities.

In our view, the Non-Human / Machine Identity market is likely to be somewhere in the middle of these two numbers in the next few years. The huge surge in adoption of GenAI would not have been factored in, and the fact that over 80% of breaches are now identity-related, with identity security becoming the new cybersecurity perimeter.

As noted in the next section on VC investment, it is very evident the NHI market is exploding, and we expect the market to grow massively in the next few years, far exceeding the earlier projections.

VC Investment

Overall, in 2024 there has been approximately $400 million in VC funding for a large number of start-ups developing NHI capabilities and close to $900 million overall, which is a staggering amount of growth and investment in this space.

Note: For our analysis, we used the following companies: Akeyless, Aembit, Andromeda, Anetac, Astrix, Britive, Clutch, Corsha, Entro, GitGuardian, Oasis, Oleria, Opal, Permiso, P0 Security, SlashID, Silverfort, Spirl, Token, TrustFour, Veza.

This list is not exhaustive companies with NHI capabilities, and we have not included many of the IGA/PAM products that are getting into this space or have been in the space for a while, including CyberArk/Venafi, Saviynt, KeyFactor, Delinea, HashiCorp, BeyondTrust, and SailPoint.

Note: We have sourced the funding data from a number of third-party providers, so it’s possible there could be small inaccuracies in the actual numbers, but it shows the overall trend in growth and investment.

Source – Non-Human Identity Management Group

The Need for Specialist NHI Focused Programs and Products

Below is a piece I originally wrote in Francis Odum’s “The Complete Guide to the Growing Impact of NHIs in Cybersecurity” report, which I have updated slightly.

Based on the current fragmented identity ecosystem, where no one solution solves the problem, it is clear that the industry requires a comprehensive solution.

Our NHI Mgmt Group conducted a big industry survey involving close to 330 security practitioners on whether non-human identity products and human identity products should be kept separate or converge. While the result was close, 55% to 45% in favor of keeping non-human identity products separate from human identity products, the reality is that some of the folks who voted for convergence see it as an ideal end-state view, but clearly understand there is a valid case for keeping the focus on NHI risks separate for now.

The challenges and approaches to addressing non-human identity risks versus human identity risks are very different. For example, addressing hardcoded passwords in source code requires discovery through scanning tools, and then remediation requires shift-left DevSecOps CI/CD processes integrated into a secrets vault.

While there may be overlapping identity lifecycle processes for non-human and human identities, there is a clear need to manage NHI identity risk programs separately from human identity risk programs. Specialized NHI products are more vertically focused on discovering and managing NHI risks.

In the longer term, as the industry moves towards a zero-trust model and we move away from static secrets to more of a JIT model, we may see more convergence, as it then becomes a more generic problem of identity management and security.

Some vendors have already made a play to cover both Non-Human and Human Identities in one product. Karen Crowley from Andromeda Security writes a nice piece, “Human Identity and NHI Must Be Addressed Together“.

The Vendors

Below are a number of vendors that have NHI capabilities. Some of them:

• Are pure NHI products and some cover Human Identities also.
• Cover the Core Lifecycle Processes (focused more on Static Secrets) and/or the Advanced Prevent Lifecycle Processes (Dynamic Secrets, etc.) we talked about earlier.
• Cover a mixture of Cloud, Hybrid-Cloud, SaaS, and On-Prem.

Note this is not an exhaustive list; there are many more that we will look to add to the report in due course.

Note the descriptions below on each vendor and their product capabilities have been provided directly by the vendors and do not in any way represent the opinions of the NHI Mgmt Group.

The vendors have been listed in alphabetical order.

Aembit

Aembit is the Workload Identity and Access Management Platform that secures access between non-human identities. With Aembit, businesses can fully automate secretless, policy-based, and Zero Trust workload access.

You can think of Aembit as Okta for workloads. Aembit does this via an identity broker that grants secretless access, just-in-time, based on the workload’s identity and posture. Leveraging native identities and sophisticated automation via a no-code approach, Aembit eliminates the need for developers to store sensitive secrets within applications or vaults. And DevOps no longer needs to manually manage service accounts or rotate credentials.

With Aembit, companies can:

• Secure access to sensitive resources by discovering, validating, and enforcing access rights in real-time using the native identity of the workload and an access policy, instead of a long-lived secret.
• Reduce risk by providing zero trust conditional access for NHIs
• Automate DevOps by minimizing secrets rotation, reducing key sprawl, and the need for secrets scanning.
• Remove the burden of auth from developers through no-code auth-as-a-service.

AKeyless

Akeyless is redefining identity security for the modern enterprise, delivering a unified Secrets & Non-Human Identity platform designed to prevent the #1 cause of breaches – compromised machine identities and secrets.

Akeyless Security delivers a cloud-native SaaS platform that integrates Vaultless Secrets Management with Certificate Lifecycle Management, Next Gen Privileged Access (Secure Remote Access), and Encryption Key Management to manage the lifecycle of all machine identities and secrets across all environments.

Akeyless Unified Secrets & Non-Human Identity Platform has been adopted by several large enterprises across healthcare, financial, technology, and retail organizations delivering:

• Improved Visibility across all secrets and machine identities / non-human identities
• Enhanced Efficiency of a SaaS platform, including multi-product consolidation
• Complete Control across the full lifecycle of credentials, certificates and keys
• Proactive Security with DFC™ Zero-Knowledge and modern “Secretless” authentication

Andromeda Security

Comprehensive Human + Non-Human Identity Security

Andromeda Security combats the mounting challenges in Cloud and SaaS arising from identity sprawl, excessive privileges, and manual processes. We take a data-centric approach, correlated with AI models, to provide risk-based actionable insights and gain control over your human users, non-human identities (NHI), and applications.

We treat NHI as part of a unified identity security strategy and leverage rich context from risk, usage, and behavioral analytics to address all aspects of NHI (and human identities). Our approach goes beyond discovery and credential management to include activities and permissions management.

Andromeda Security offers the following capabilities to enable both security and productivity:

• Discover human and non-human identities
• Assign risk scores based on posture, behavior, and privileges
• Track activities and remove unused and inactive identities
• Gain fine-grained visibility into permissions usage
• Reduce attack surface by right-sizing roles
• Implement frictionless just-in-time (JIT) privileged access
• Simplify compliance with automated user access reviews (UARs)
• Automate identity lifecycle and governance

Astrix Security

Secure and manage the lifecycle of NHIs such as service accounts, API keys, secrets, and OAuth tokens across SaaS, Cloud, and On-Prem environments.

• Inventory: Real-time discovery of NHIs.
• Posture Management: Prioritize NHI risks and improve security posture.
• Non-Human ITDR: Detect and respond to anomalous activity and third-party breaches.
• NHI Lifecycle Management: Control and manage NHIs from creation to expiry.
• Auto-Remediation: Automate remediation with integrations and playbooks.
• Next-Gen Secret Scanning: Map exposed secrets and easily rotate them.

AxisNow

AxisNow provides a simple yet powerful Non-Human Access Hub for the AI and automation world.

The non-human (applications, scripts, and services) identity infra and traffic hub. Identity-centric security, secure non-human access across environments. Providing the necessary speed, scalability, and reliability for production.

Key Features：

• Edge: Trusted combination of machine identity and egress gateway.
• Endpoint: Cross-environment connection of all non-human client endpoints and server endpoints.
• Policy: The central identity and traffic orchestration layer.
• Insight: Full-stack logs and observability.
• Platform: Multi-tenant, developer friendly and ecosystem integration.

Britive

Britive is a cloud-native privileged access management (PAM) platform purpose-built to secure and manage access for both human and non-human identities across multi-cloud and hybrid on-prem environments. Everything we do at Britive is designed to address the unique challenges of managing identities in modern, complex infrastructures.

With our agentless, cross-functionally aligned PAM solution, Britive empowers development teams, platform engineers, and security professionals to securely and seamlessly manage dynamic access without compromising security, innovation, or operational efficiency.

Key Features and Capabilities:

• Proactively Mitigate Identity & Access Risks with Zero Trust
• Patented Just-in-Time (JIT) Access
• Unified Access Management
• Simplified Compliance & Audit Readiness
• Self-Service Access with Access Builder
• DevOps & Automation Workflow Support with PyBritive
• Secrets Management & Credential Vaulting
• Rapid Scalability

Corsha

Corsha’s platform embodies zero trust principles anchored in identity security to protect lifecycles, authenticate and govern the identities securing operational systems. The platform delivers innovative machine-to-machine authentication and secure communications.

• Next Generation Machine Identity – Focus on Identity and Access Management, Not Static Credentials like Certificates, API Keys, or Attributes that are easily spoofed.
• From Anywhere to Anywhere – Monitor and control all Machine communication. Securely connect across hybrid clouds, legacy systems, and even shop floors.
• A Centralized View – Corsha Console provides a unified view of your Non-human Identities, ensuring trusted machine access with configurable trust levels and a deny-first API security approach.

Entro Security

Entro securely manages the full lifecycle of Non-Human Identities and the secrets that create them.

• Discovery & Inventory – Discover all NHIs at creation locations, vaults, and exposure locations for a full inventory.
• Classification – Enrich each NHI and secret to understand owners, permissions, usage, enablement, rotation time, and more.
• Posture Management – Right-size permissions and avoid misconfigurations.
• NHIDR – Monitor all secrets, NHIs, and vaults for any abnormal behavior.
• Rotation & Vaulting – Streamline rotation and ensure secrets are vaulted.
• Decommission – Remove stale and unused NHIs to reduce the attack surface.

GitGuardian

GitGuardian has a comprehensive approach to tackling your Non-Human Identity challenges, focusing on two key areas :

1. NHI Governance – Objective: Ensuring all identities and secrets are fully managed and secured.

• Discover and maintain a centralized inventory of all secrets.
• Get detailed context and scopes around each secret.
• Remove the pain of managing multiple secrets managers.
• Manage secrets continuously across their entire lifecycle.
• Assess secrets security posture and improve IAM hygiene.

2. Secrets Security – Objective: Detecting, remediating, and preventing secrets leaks, aiming for 0% leaked secrets.

• Detect and remediate company-related leaked secrets on public GitHub to secure your organization’s attack surface.
• Identify and address secrets sprawl across the internal tech stack to prevent insider and external threats.
• Use decoy secrets to detect unauthorized access and respond swiftly to mitigate secrets-related breaches.

Natoma

Natoma is on a mission to safeguard NHIs and empower enterprises to securely connect any technology. The comprehensive platform allows customers to secure and manage all NHIs, including service accounts, access tokens, API keys, workloads, bots, and more.

Natoma automatically discovers NHIs across your ecosystem and surfaces intelligent context regarding ownership, downstream dependencies, and permissions. The platform goes beyond a surface-level view of NHIs – we feature deep contextual data and graphs to illustrate the relationship between NHIs and systems. Natoma then continuously monitors NHIs to surface issues or anomalies.

• The platform also provides automated lifecycle management with on-demand & policy-based rotations and seamless governance. Natoma automates every step of the NHI lifecycle including:
• Rotation, ensuring credentials are regularly updated and secure
• Revocation, safely deactivating unused NHIs
• Rightsizing permissions based on usage data
• Reassignment, ensuring smooth transitions when owners leave or change roles
• Reviewing, certifying that NHIs are still relevant and required

Oasis Security

Oasis NHI Security Cloud is an enterprise cloud service for managing and securing NHIs across the hybrid cloud.

Powered by purpose-built AI/ML intelligence engines, Oasis combines NHI auto-discovery, vulnerability detection, rapid remediation, policy-based lifecycle orchestration, and compliance management in a single integrated, easy-to-use solution.

Unique Capabilities:

• NHI auto-discovery and classification across hybrid cloud
• Context Reconstruction
• Ownership discovery
• Risk posture analysis
• Threat detection
• Remediation
• Policy-driven lifecycle orchestration
• Identity Lifecycle management workflows

P0 Security

P0 Security is a unified IGA and PAM platform for the cloud that governs and secures all forms of access for both human and non-human machine identities.

• Inventory all cloud identities and owners.
• Identify risks, including over-privileged access and unused identities.
• View resources at risk due to vulnerable identities.
• Assign owners for each service account and NHI.
• Manage the complete lifecycle from creation to deactivation.
• Enforce policy-based controls to achieve least-privilege access.
• Secure access at scale with automated workflows.
• Automate regular access reviews, credential management, and secret rotations.

SlashID

SlashID is a comprehensive identity security platform designed to protect both human and non-human identities across cloud, on-premises, and SaaS environments. It provides a unified solution to streamline compliance and enhance security posture through a graph-based approach augmented with runtime data.

Key Features:

• Unified Identity Graph: Gain visibility across all environments with comprehensive inventory tracking, toxic combination detection, custom tagging for Separation of Duties (SoD) mapping, and attack path discovery.
• Threat Detection: Identify posture issues and actively detect threats, including malicious OAuth 2.0 apps, fake delegated Identity Providers (IdPs), and forged tokens.
• Compliance Framework Mapping: Effortlessly generate compliance reports, reducing the manual effort required for assessments and ensuring faster adherence to industry standards.
• Automated Remediation: Automatically enforce corrective actions such as blocking, suspending accounts, rotating credentials, applying conditional access, or enforcing MFA to mitigate the impact of attacks and simplify compliance management.
• Identity Lifecycle Management: Ensure proper attestation and provisioning of non-human identities (NHIs) and detect and remediate onboarding and offboarding processes.

Teleport

Teleport Machine & Workload Identity, part of the Teleport Platform, secures machine and workload access to systems and data by issuing short-lived cryptographic identities to machines and workloads.

Key use cases include:

• Eliminate Static Credentials – Securely push artifacts and deploy code without hard-coding credentials. Authorize access only during the period of time that work is being performed.
• Secure CI / CD Pipelines – Securely push artifacts and deploy code without hard-coding credentials. Authorize access only during the period of time that work is being performed.
• Secure Inter-Service Communication – Enable mutual TLS (mTLS) connections, governed by fine-grained access policies between microservices and service meshes.
• Protect Data and Achieve Compliance – Ensure that only authorized services can access protected data stores and APIs, with data exportable to SIEMs for compliance reporting & review.

Teleport Machine & Workload Identity reduces friction for engineers by removing the task of secrets administration and unifying access control across hybrid cloud environments, unifies human and non-human access policies, and hardens security by eliminating static, over-privileged credentials in service accounts.

TrustFour

TrustFour secures workload and AI attack surfaces, ensuring all interactions are authenticated and authorized. TrustFour protects against unauthorized lateral movement by enabling standards compliance, interaction mapping, non-human/machine identity discovery, connectivity telemetry, observability, and deterrence against unauthorized access.

Key Features:

• Data-in-Transit Observability
• Advanced Deterrence Telemetry
• NHI & Service Account Tracking
• Workload Authorization Map & Notable Alerting
• Workload Attack Surface/Lateral Movement Control
• TLS and Post-Quantum Compliance and Cryptographic Agility

Unosecur

Unosecur is a cutting-edge cloud identity security platform that safeguards human and non-human identities in real-time.

• Full contextual inventory of Non-Human Identities, such as keys and secrets, while quantifying risks and enforcing ‘ruthless’ least privilege policies.
• Real-time threat detection – halts attacks like privilege escalation and lateral movement as they happen, using AI-powered insights and no-code IAM workflows for rapid, seamless remediation.
• Out-of-the-box integrations with IDPs and incident management tools ensure top-tier security without disrupting productivity in multi-cloud environments.

Whiteswan Securty

Whiteswan Security provides full lifecycle management for service accounts with automated discovery, granular access controls, and visibility into anomalous threat activity.

• Automated Access Control – Eliminate manual intervention with real-time controls.
• Time-Bound Permissions – Limit access to key infrastructure and data.
• Comprehensive Visibility – 360-degree visibility across all access events.
• Identity-Based Micro-Perimeters – Secure users and devices with dynamic, identity-centric boundaries to prevent unauthorized access.
• Granular Access Policies – Enforce least-privilege principles.
• Real-Time Threat Protection – Neutralize threats instantly with advanced analytics.

10 – 2025 Outlook – Predictions

I expect 2025 to be a pivotal year in the Non-Human Identity Management space for a number of reasons (see my festive 12 Days of NHIs post).

MrNHI and the NHI Mgmt Group – As I take on my new full-time role as Mr NHI, our goal at the NHI Mgmt Group will be to help lead the charge in educating and evangelising about NHI risks.

We hope this research report becomes a defining moment in the history of the Non-Human Identity space, helping to accelerate progress in the industry.

Non-Human/Machine Identities will be the hottest topic in the identity management/security space, as seen and talked about at Gartner IAM in December. We expect significant events in 2025 that will massively amplify the noise levels around NHIs – more news on that to be announced shortly.

Organisations start investing in NHI programs – We expect to see organisations increasingly seeking guidance on NHI risk management, given the increased visibility and understanding of the exposures. We expect they will no longer be driven into starting a NHI program based on an incident or breach.

However, they will face a huge dilemma: How do you tackle the “huge elephant in the room” and take a risk-based approach to get the biggest bang for your investment?

This is something our NHI Mgmt Group has a very deep understanding of, as highlighted in this report. We can provide you with independent guidance and advice on the options that are the right fit for your organisation.

Growth in NHI Advisory/Consultancy space – While we expect huge growth on the vendor/product side, we also predict significant growth in the consultancy, reseller, and system integrator space. Professional services organisations, which historically focused on the Human Identity space, will start vying for a slice of the huge NHI pie.

Buying a product is part of the answer but not the whole answer. Many larger organisations will need to set up dedicated NHI programs and teams, using a combination of their existing IAM resources as well as professional services organisations.

Regulators and Auditors are coming – You better watch out, as they are now shifting focus away from Human Identity, PAM, Developer Access to Production controls, and towards NHI risks. There is so much low-hanging fruit for them to find, such as plain-text/unencrypted credentials in source code, etc.

Note that while most people worry about cyber risks/attacks with NHIs, don’t forget the internal actors within your organisations who may maliciously or accidentally cause impact using NHIs. Humans using NHIs within an organisation is a huge problem and one that regulators and auditors will definitely hone in on, so don’t think this is just a cyber risk.

Industry continues to mature towards Zero Trust architectures – Standards like SPIFFE, WIMSE, and SPICE will help drive the big push towards Zero-Trust and Just-In-Time Ephemeral Secrets.

Real-Time Threat Detection and Prevention – In speaking to a number of CISOs last year, they all realised the huge challenges around NHIs. In some cases, they have said it’s not practical, or they don’t have the budgets to focus on the huge efforts required to remediate NHI risks, given all their other security priorities. They see preventative controls, i.e., stopping threats in real-time, as a key capability that needs to be delivered by the industry so they can quickly get control of the risks, while strategically moving towards a target state Zero-Trust model.

Over 50-100 major NHI breaches in 2025, as a result of increased AI-driven attacks.

AI tips NHI risks over the edge – From a security risk/posture management standpoint, AI is weaponised for NHI attacks.

AI may also help massively with the NHI challenge. As we have clearly articulated in this research report, this is probably the most complex security challenge facing the industry. The sheer scale of what is required to deal with the huge secrets sprawl challenge, hyper-fragmentation, etc., requires something more radical. Using AI may help deal with massively streamlining, automating, and managing the lifecycle process for NHIs.

Could we, for example, see AI models that can identify hard-coded credentials in source code, apply context, understand all the dependencies, set up the credentials in a vault, automatically remove the hard-coded credentials from source code, deploy the updated code in a staggered manner to reduce operational impact, and then cycle the credentials on a regular basis, without any human intervention?

• AI folks, have I just given you the perfect recipe for transforming NHI Management? 😉

Quantum Computing Threats continue to remain a big concern for the industry, with a clear impact on NHIs.

Huge Acquisitions and Consolidation in the Market – Industry heavyweights will make their play, given the huge growth potential around the NHI market. Existing players will merge and combine their capabilities to help accelerate greater innovation in the market.

Given our NHI Mgmt Group probably has the deepest understanding of the NHI market, we have seen many NHI companies emerge in the last 12-18 months, and existing identity players getting into the NHI space. I personally feel we are getting very close to saturation point with the number of players in the market, and there will need to be some consolidation and clearer differentiating products/capabilities to survive in this highly competitive market.

Could AI newcomers also disrupt the NHI market? – We have already seen a number enter the broader identity market (like Twine Security and RedBlock AI) that could be disruptive to the industry.

Existing NHI companies will need to invest heavily in AI capabilities to continue having a differentiating offering, as Astrix Security is planning with their recent $45M Series B fund raise announcement.

I would say the NHI market has matured at a rapid pace in the last 12 months, but based on my deep understanding of the problem space, there is a long way to go to reach the maturity level seen in the Human Identity or PAM space.

Closing Remarks

I personally can’t wait to see what 2025 brings in the Non-Human / Machine / Workload Identity space. Exciting times ahead! Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a crazy ride, and our NHI Mgmt Group is right at the front, leading the way 😉

With this report my goal was to create the most definitive research report ever produced on NHIs (including a hands-on practitioner’s view) that I hope will stand the test of time and achieve the primary goal: to help educate everyone in the industry and help move the needle on this massive challenge the industry and organisations are facing.

Let’s stop the rise of Non-Human and Machine Identities and get them under control!

Acknowledgements

Firstly, given the huge magnitude of this report and the many weeks of effort put into it (including many late nights), there may be some inaccuracies or errors. Please let us know if anything needs correcting.

• Thanks to my team at the NHI Mgmt Group, in particular Abdou and Seb, who helped with the Dorking and NHI Breach content and Anita and Anika reviewing this monster 70 page document.
• I would like to thank all our strategic partners who supported us in our journey at the NHI Mgmt Group last year, helping educate and evangelise about the NHI challenges, and building a great community that can work and collaborate to protect organisations from these huge risks around NHIs.
• I would also like to thank Francis Odum for giving me the opportunity to contribute to and review his comprehensive NHI report published earlier last year. This inspired me to produce this report, which I hope is worthy of the amazing work Francis produces. I hope this report takes things to the next level in terms of depth and breadth, based on 25+ years of hands-on practitioner experience and the work we do at the NHI Mgmt Group.
• I would also like to thank everyone I have interacted with, worked with, supported me, provided guidance and advice, as we established our NHI Mgmt Group as the number one authority in the Non-Human Identity space. I look forward to continuing to work with you all, making a huge impact through our NHI community to tackle one of the most challenging problems in the industry.

Who are the NHI Mgmt Group: Your Premier Partner in Non-Human Identity Management

The NHI Mgmt Group, is the market-leading research and advisory firm in the Non-Human Identity (NHI) space. We are your trusted partner for independent guidance and advice, helping you manage the complex risks associated with Non-Human Identities.

Why Choose Us?

• Unmatched Expertise: Our team boasts over 25 years of experience advising, establishing, and managing global regulatory IAM/NHI programs at major financial institutions.
• Comprehensive Knowledge Centre: Dive into our extensive resources, including foundational articles on NHIs, industry white papers, major breach analysis, research reports, blogs, educational videos, industry surveys, newsletters, and detailed product information to support NHI risk management.
• Industry Leadership: Founded by an IAM industry veteran, our group has pioneered global regulatory NHI programs, authored major white papers and research on NHIs and established the thriving NHI LinkedIn Community Group. Recognised as the #1 NHI evangelist and voice in the industry, we are at the forefront of NHI innovation and advocacy.

Our Commitment to You:

At the NHI Mgmt Group, we are dedicated to advancing the NHI landscape through cutting-edge research, strategic partnerships, and unparalleled expertise. Join us in navigating the future of Non-Human Identity Management and stay ahead in this rapidly evolving field.

Let us help you turn the tide on NHI risks and achieve greater security and efficiency in your organisation. Together, we can conquer the challenges and seize the opportunities presented by the ever-expanding world of NHIs.

Ready to Tackle Non-Human Identity Risks?

Reach out to us for expert, independent guidance and advice. Together, we can create a robust strategy to manage and mitigate NHI risks. Let’s transform challenges into opportunities!

Training and awareness programs for non-human identity governance

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on training and awareness programs for non-human identity governance! In today’s digital landscape, managing the identities of non-human entities—such as bots, AI systems, and automated processes—is crucial for maintaining security and compliance. This webpage will explore effective training strategies, best practices, and innovative awareness programs designed to empower organizations in navigating the complexities of non-human identity governance. By understanding the importance of these programs, you will enhance your organization’s ability to mitigate risks, ensure accountability, and foster a culture of responsible technology use. Join us as we delve into the essential components of non-human identity governance and equip yourself with the knowledge to thrive in this evolving field.

Importance of Non-Human Identity Governance

Definition and Scope of Non-Human Identities

Non-human identities refer to digital entities such as bots, algorithms, and machine learning models that interact autonomously within digital ecosystems. As organizations increasingly rely on these technologies, the need for effective non-human identity governance has become paramount. This governance framework ensures that these identities are managed, monitored, and regulated to mitigate risks associated with their operation.

Impact on Security and Privacy

The rise of non-human identities poses significant challenges to security and privacy. Without proper governance, these digital entities can be exploited for malicious purposes, leading to data breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive information. Furthermore, the lack of oversight may result in unintentional privacy violations, eroding consumer trust and damaging organizational reputations.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

The governance of non-human identities is fraught with legal and ethical dilemmas. Questions surrounding accountability, liability, and the ethical implications of machine decision-making require careful consideration. Organizations must navigate a complex landscape of regulations while ensuring adherence to ethical standards that prioritize user rights and data protection.

Key Components of Training Programs

Curriculum Development for Non-Human Identity Governance

Developing a comprehensive curriculum for non-human identity governance is crucial for effective training programs. The curriculum should encompass topics such as the types of non-human identities, their roles in business processes, and practical governance strategies. By providing a well-rounded education, organizations can empower their workforce to manage these identities responsibly.

Role of Technology in Training

Technology plays a pivotal role in enhancing training for non-human identity governance. Tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation can streamline training processes, making them more efficient and engaging. For instance, AI-driven simulations can provide hands-on experience in managing non-human identities, allowing trainees to navigate real-world scenarios in a controlled environment.

Best Practices for Engaging Stakeholders

Engaging stakeholders is essential for the success of training initiatives. Best practices include involving key personnel in the curriculum development process, fostering collaboration among departments, and ensuring that training is tailored to the specific needs of different stakeholder groups. By creating a sense of ownership and relevance, organizations can enhance participation and commitment to governance practices.

Raising Awareness Among Stakeholders

Identifying Target Audiences

Understanding who the target audiences are for awareness programs is critical. Key stakeholders may include developers, project managers, compliance officers, and executive leadership. Each group has unique concerns and responsibilities related to non-human identity governance, necessitating tailored messaging and outreach strategies.

Communication Strategies for Effective Outreach

Effective communication strategies are vital for raising awareness about non-human identity governance. Organizations should leverage multiple channels, such as internal newsletters, webinars, and social media, to disseminate information. Crafting clear, concise messages that emphasize the importance of governance and the potential risks associated with neglecting it can help capture stakeholder interest.

Utilizing Case Studies to Illustrate Risks and Benefits

Incorporating real-world case studies into awareness initiatives can significantly enhance understanding. Highlighting instances where poor governance led to security breaches or ethical dilemmas can underscore the importance of proactive management. Conversely, showcasing successful governance strategies can illustrate the benefits of robust oversight, encouraging stakeholders to take action.

Implementation of Awareness Programs

Designing Interactive Workshops and Seminars

Interactive workshops and seminars provide a dynamic platform for stakeholders to learn about non-human identity governance. These sessions can include group discussions, role-playing exercises, and hands-on activities that foster engagement and facilitate knowledge retention. By creating an interactive learning environment, organizations can better prepare their teams to handle governance challenges.

Incorporating E-Learning Modules and Resources

E-learning modules offer flexibility and accessibility, making it easier for stakeholders to engage with training materials at their own pace. Organizations can develop online resources, such as tutorials, quizzes, and video lectures, to complement traditional training methods. This blended approach accommodates diverse learning styles and enhances overall comprehension of governance principles.

Measuring Effectiveness and Gathering Feedback

To ensure the success of awareness programs, organizations must implement mechanisms for measuring effectiveness and gathering feedback. Surveys, assessments, and participation metrics can provide valuable insights into the impact of training initiatives. By analyzing this data, organizations can identify areas for improvement and refine their programs accordingly.

Future Trends in Non-Human Identity Governance

Emerging Technologies and Their Implications

As technology continues to evolve, so too will the landscape of non-human identity governance. Emerging technologies, such as blockchain and advanced AI, present both opportunities and challenges. Organizations must stay informed about these developments to adapt their governance strategies and effectively manage the associated risks.

Evolving Regulations and Compliance Requirements

Regulatory frameworks surrounding data protection and digital identity are constantly changing. Organizations need to remain vigilant and proactive in their compliance efforts, ensuring that their governance practices align with the latest legal requirements. This adaptability will not only safeguard against penalties but also reinforce stakeholder confidence.

The Role of International Collaboration in Governance Efforts

Global collaboration will play a crucial role in shaping the future of non-human identity governance. As digital identities transcend borders, international partnerships can facilitate the sharing of best practices, regulatory insights, and technological advancements. By working together, organizations can create a more cohesive and effective governance framework that addresses the complexities of a connected world.

Non-human identity compliance regulations

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on non-human identity compliance regulations, where we delve into the essential guidelines governing the identity verification of non-human entities, such as artificial intelligence, bots, and digital identities. As technology continues to evolve, understanding these regulations becomes crucial for businesses and developers alike. In this article, we’ll explore key aspects of compliance, including the legal frameworks, best practices for implementation, and the implications for data security and privacy. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a business owner, or simply curious about the future of digital identity, this page will equip you with the knowledge you need to navigate the complexities of non-human identity compliance.

Overview of Non-Human Identity Compliance Regulations

Definition and Scope of Non-Human Identity

Non-human identity refers to digital entities or automated systems that possess unique identifiers but are not human. These can include artificial intelligence, bots, and IoT devices that interact with users or other systems. As technology evolves, the scope of non-human identities expands, necessitating the development of compliance regulations to govern their use and management.

Importance of Compliance in Various Sectors

Compliance with regulations governing non-human identities is crucial across various sectors, including finance, healthcare, and technology. Ensuring that these digital entities adhere to legal standards is vital for protecting user privacy, maintaining data integrity, and fostering trust among consumers. Non-compliance can lead to severe penalties, reputational damage, and loss of customer confidence.

Historical Context and Evolution of Regulations

The evolution of non-human identity compliance regulations has been influenced by significant technological advancements and rising concerns about privacy and data security. Initially, regulations focused primarily on human identities, but as non-human entities began to proliferate, lawmakers recognized the need to adapt existing frameworks. This has led to the emergence of specific guidelines and standards aimed at governing the actions and data handling of non-human identities.

Key Regulations Governing Non-Human Identities

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Implications

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a comprehensive data protection law in the EU that has significant implications for non-human identities. While primarily focused on personal data protection, the GDPR also impacts how organizations manage data generated by automated systems. Compliance requires that entities ensure transparency and accountability in their data processing activities, regardless of whether the data pertains to human or non-human identities.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Its Relevance

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is another critical piece of legislation that influences non-human identity compliance. The CCPA grants consumers greater control over their personal information and mandates businesses to disclose how they collect, use, and share data. As non-human entities increasingly interact with consumer data, organizations must ensure that their practices align with CCPA requirements to avoid hefty fines and legal repercussions.

Industry-Specific Regulations (e.g., Financial, Healthcare)

Different industries are subject to specific regulations concerning non-human identities. For instance, the financial sector is governed by regulations like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), which mandates strict data protection measures. Similarly, the healthcare industry must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), ensuring that non-human entities handling sensitive health information adhere to stringent privacy standards.

Challenges in Non-Human Identity Compliance

Ambiguity in Defining Non-Human Identities

One of the primary challenges in non-human identity compliance is the ambiguity surrounding the definition of non-human identities. The lack of a standardized framework makes it difficult for organizations to determine which entities fall under regulatory purview. This uncertainty can lead to inconsistent compliance efforts and increased risk exposure.

Technological Limitations in Identity Verification

Technological limitations also pose significant challenges in verifying non-human identities. Traditional identity verification methods may not be suitable for automated systems, leading to potential vulnerabilities and compliance gaps. Organizations must invest in advanced technologies to effectively manage and authenticate non-human identities.

Balancing Privacy Concerns with Compliance Requirements

Striking a balance between privacy concerns and compliance requirements is a daunting task for many organizations. While regulations demand transparency and accountability, they can also conflict with the need to protect sensitive data. Organizations must navigate this delicate balance to ensure they meet compliance standards without compromising user privacy.

Best Practices for Achieving Compliance

Implementing Robust Data Governance Frameworks

To achieve compliance with non-human identity regulations, organizations should implement robust data governance frameworks. This includes establishing clear policies for data collection, usage, and retention, as well as appointing dedicated teams to oversee compliance efforts. A well-defined governance structure can significantly enhance an organization’s ability to adhere to regulatory standards.

Utilizing Advanced Technologies for Identity Management

Leveraging advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, can enhance identity management for non-human entities. These technologies provide innovative solutions for tracking, verifying, and protecting non-human identities, enabling organizations to meet compliance requirements more efficiently.

Continuous Monitoring and Auditing Processes

Establishing continuous monitoring and auditing processes is essential for maintaining compliance with non-human identity regulations. Regular assessments can help organizations identify potential compliance gaps, implement corrective actions, and ensure that their practices evolve alongside regulatory changes.

Future Trends in Non-Human Identity Compliance

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning will significantly impact non-human identity compliance. These technologies can facilitate more sophisticated identity verification processes and improve data management practices. However, they also present new regulatory challenges that organizations must navigate.

Anticipated Regulatory Changes and Adaptations

As technology continues to evolve, regulatory frameworks are expected to adapt accordingly. Organizations should stay informed about anticipated changes in non-human identity regulations to ensure their compliance strategies remain effective and up-to-date.

The Role of International Cooperation in Standardization

International cooperation will play a crucial role in establishing standardized regulations for non-human identities. As businesses increasingly operate in a global environment, harmonizing regulations across borders will help streamline compliance efforts and foster innovation in identity management practices.

Non-human identity lifecycle management

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on non-human identity lifecycle management, a vital aspect of modern digital security and operational efficiency. In an age where automation and artificial intelligence are increasingly prevalent, managing the identities of non-human entities—such as bots, applications, and devices—has never been more crucial. This page will explore the key concepts of non-human identity management, including its importance in cybersecurity, the best practices for implementation, and the latest technologies that streamline the lifecycle of these digital identities. Whether you’re a business leader, IT professional, or simply curious about the future of identity management, you’ll find valuable insights to enhance your understanding and application of this essential field.

Introduction to Non-Human Identity Lifecycle Management

In our increasingly interconnected digital landscape, the management of non-human identities—entities that operate independently of human intervention—is becoming a critical focus for organizations. Non-human identities encompass various entities, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, software applications, and virtual agents, each requiring robust identity lifecycle management to ensure operational efficiency, security, and compliance.

Definition and Scope of Non-Human Identities

Non-human identities refer to the digital identities assigned to non-human entities. These can range from IoT devices, such as smart sensors and cameras, to software applications like APIs and microservices, as well as virtual agents and chatbots. The scope of non-human identity management includes the creation, maintenance, and decommissioning of these identities to facilitate secure interactions within digital ecosystems.

Importance of Identity Management for Non-Human Entities

Effective identity management for non-human entities is essential for several reasons. It helps mitigate security risks, ensures compliance with regulations, and enhances trust in automated systems. As organizations rely more on these entities for critical functions, managing their digital identities becomes paramount to prevent unauthorized access, data breaches, and compliance violations.

Overview of the Identity Lifecycle Phases

The identity lifecycle encompasses several key phases: creation, maintenance, and decommissioning. Each phase involves specific processes and considerations crucial for the effective management of non-human identities.

Phases of Non-Human Identity Lifecycle

Creation

Processes for Establishing Non-Human Identities

The creation of non-human identities involves defining the unique attributes and permissions associated with each entity. This includes registering the entity in an identity management system and assigning it a digital identity that encompasses its operational parameters.

Tools and Technologies for Identity Creation

Various tools and technologies facilitate the creation of non-human identities, including identity access management (IAM) solutions, provisioning tools, and APIs that automate the registration process. These technologies help streamline identity creation, ensuring consistency and security.

Maintenance

Regular Updates and Audits of Non-Human Identities

Ongoing maintenance involves regularly updating the attributes, permissions, and operational statuses of non-human identities. Conducting periodic audits ensures that these identities remain current and aligned with organizational policies.

Security Measures and Compliance Checks

Security measures, including access controls and encryption, are critical during the maintenance phase. Compliance checks are also essential to verify that non-human identities adhere to regulatory requirements such as GDPR and CCPA.

Decommissioning

Procedures for Safely Retiring Non-Human Identities

Decommissioning non-human identities requires following established procedures to safely retire these entities. This may involve disabling access, removing configurations, and ensuring that associated data is handled appropriately.

Data Retention and Privacy Considerations

When decommissioning identities, organizations must consider data retention policies and privacy regulations. Ensuring that data is retained only as long as necessary and securely disposed of is vital for maintaining compliance.

Types of Non-Human Identities

IoT Devices

Unique Challenges in Managing IoT Identities

IoT devices present distinct challenges for identity management due to their vast numbers, diverse functionalities, and often limited computational resources. Managing the identities of these devices requires tailored approaches that prioritize security and scalability.

Examples of IoT Applications Requiring Identity Management

Applications such as smart home systems, industrial automation, and health monitoring devices rely heavily on effective identity management to secure data exchange and ensure operational integrity.

Software Applications

Identity Management for APIs and Microservices

In modern software architectures, APIs and microservices often require unique identity management solutions. This includes implementing robust authentication and authorization mechanisms to safeguard against unauthorized access.

Role of Service Accounts in Application Security

Service accounts play a vital role in application security, particularly in automated processes. Proper management of these accounts helps reduce the risk of credential theft and misuse.

Virtual Agents and Bots

Identity Considerations for Chatbots and AI Agents

Chatbots and AI agents must have distinct identities to operate effectively within digital ecosystems. Managing these identities involves ensuring that they can authenticate users securely while respecting privacy concerns.

Impact on User Trust and Interaction

The management of non-human identities significantly influences user trust and interaction. Clear identity verification processes enhance user confidence, leading to better engagement with virtual agents.

Challenges in Non-Human Identity Management

Scalability

Difficulties in Managing Large Numbers of Non-Human Identities

As organizations scale their operations, managing large numbers of non-human identities becomes increasingly complex. The sheer volume of identities can overwhelm existing management systems, leading to potential security vulnerabilities.

Solutions for Automated Identity Management

Automated identity management solutions, including machine learning algorithms and AI-driven platforms, can help organizations efficiently manage and scale their non-human identities without compromising security.

Security Risks

Vulnerabilities Associated with Non-Human Identities

Non-human identities are often targeted by cybercriminals, leading to vulnerabilities that can compromise entire systems. Understanding these risks is crucial for developing a robust identity management strategy.

Best Practices for Safeguarding Against Identity Theft and Misuse

Implementing best practices such as multi-factor authentication, regular monitoring, and incident response plans can significantly reduce the risk of identity theft and misuse.

Compliance and Governance

Regulatory Considerations Affecting Non-Human Identities

Organizations must navigate a complex landscape of regulations that impact non-human identity management. Compliance with standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, and others is essential to avoid legal repercussions.

Frameworks for Ensuring Compliance

Developing a compliance framework that includes regular assessments, audits, and policy updates can help organizations maintain adherence to regulatory requirements related to non-human identities.

Future Trends in Non-Human Identity Lifecycle Management

Advances in AI and Automation

Role of AI in Optimizing Identity Management Processes

Artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionize identity management by automating processes, enhancing security protocols, and providing insights through data analysis. This can lead to more efficient identity lifecycle management.

Predictions for the Future of Identity Management Technologies

The future of identity management technologies will likely see an increased focus on integrating AI, machine learning, and automation to streamline processes and minimize human error.

Integration with Emerging Technologies

Impact of Blockchain on Identity Management

Blockchain technology offers a decentralized approach to identity management, providing secure, tamper-proof identity verification systems. This can enhance trust and security in non-human identity management.

Potential of Decentralized Identity Solutions

Decentralized identity solutions empower entities to control their identities without relying on a central authority, increasing security and privacy for non-human identities.

Evolving Standards and Protocols

Development of Industry Standards for Non-Human Identities

The emergence of industry standards for non-human identities will help ensure consistency and interoperability across various platforms. This is crucial for fostering collaboration among stakeholders.

Importance of Collaboration Among Stakeholders in the Identity Ecosystem

Collaboration among technology providers, regulators, and organizations is essential to develop effective identity management frameworks, ensuring that non-human identities are secure, compliant, and efficient.

By focusing on non-human identity lifecycle management, organizations can navigate the complexities of digital identity in a way that enhances security, compliance, and operational efficiency. As technology continues to evolve, so too will the strategies and tools required to effectively manage non-human identities.

DevSecOps practices for non-human identity security

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on DevSecOps practices for non-human identity security, where we explore the critical intersection of development, security, and operations in safeguarding automated systems and applications. In today’s digital landscape, protecting non-human identities—such as APIs, bots, and microservices—is essential for maintaining robust security protocols. This page will equip you with practical strategies, best practices, and tools to integrate security into your DevOps pipeline effectively. Discover how to mitigate risks, enhance compliance, and ensure that your non-human identities are as secure as your human users, all while fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement. Join us on this journey to strengthen your organization’s security posture!

Overview of DevSecOps and Non-Human Identity Security

Definition of DevSecOps

DevSecOps is an evolution of the DevOps methodology that integrates security practices into the entire software development lifecycle. By incorporating security from the outset, organizations can create a culture of shared responsibility where security is a fundamental aspect of development and operations. This proactive approach not only helps in identifying vulnerabilities early but also ensures that security measures are automated and scalable.

Importance of Non-Human Identities

In today’s digital landscape, non-human identities such as APIs, microservices, and bots play a crucial role in the functionality of applications and services. These identities often operate autonomously and interact with systems without human intervention, making them attractive targets for cyber threats. Securing these non-human identities is essential to maintain the integrity and security of an organization’s infrastructure and data.

The Role of Security in the DevOps Lifecycle

Security is no longer an afterthought; it must be embedded throughout the DevOps lifecycle. From the initial design and development stages to deployment and monitoring, the integration of security measures ensures that vulnerabilities can be identified and mitigated in real-time. By prioritizing security within DevOps, organizations can foster a resilient environment that minimizes risks associated with non-human identities.

Key Principles of DevSecOps for Non-Human Identities

Automation of Security Practices Throughout the Development Lifecycle

Automating security practices is vital in the fast-paced world of DevSecOps. By integrating security checks into automated workflows, organizations can ensure consistent application of security measures. Automation tools can help enforce security policies, perform static and dynamic code analysis, and validate configurations, allowing teams to focus on innovation without compromising on security.

Integration of Security Tools Within CI/CD Pipelines

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines are the backbone of modern software development. By embedding security tools such as static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) within these pipelines, organizations can identify vulnerabilities early and automatically remediate issues before they reach production. This integration helps maintain a secure environment while accelerating delivery.

Continuous Monitoring and Feedback Loops for Security Posture

Establishing continuous monitoring mechanisms is essential for maintaining a strong security posture. By implementing real-time monitoring solutions, organizations can gain insights into the security status of their non-human identities. Feedback loops allow teams to quickly respond to security incidents, adapt security measures, and continuously improve their defense mechanisms.

Implementing Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Non-Human Identities

Implementing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is critical in managing permissions for non-human identities. By assigning roles based on the principle of least privilege, organizations can ensure that each identity has the minimum access necessary to perform its functions. This reduces the attack surface and limits potential damage in the event of a security breach.

Least Privilege Principle to Minimize Exposure

The least privilege principle dictates that non-human identities should only have access to the resources they absolutely need. By minimizing exposure, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches. Regularly reviewing and adjusting permissions is essential to uphold this principle.

Regular Audits and Reviews of Identity Access Permissions

Conducting regular audits and reviews of identity access permissions is vital for maintaining security. These audits help identify any unnecessary privileges granted to non-human identities and allow for timely remediation. Implementing a routine schedule for audits reinforces the importance of security and ensures compliance with organizational policies.

Security Best Practices for Non-Human Identities

Use of Strong Authentication Mechanisms

Implementing strong authentication mechanisms, such as OAuth tokens and API keys, is crucial for safeguarding non-human identities. These methods provide a secure way to authenticate and authorize API requests, reducing the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems.

Encryption of Sensitive Data in Transit and at Rest

To protect sensitive information, organizations must employ encryption for data both in transit and at rest. This ensures that even if data is intercepted or accessed by unauthorized parties, it remains unreadable and secure. Utilizing industry-standard encryption protocols is essential for maintaining data integrity.

Regular Vulnerability Scanning and Patch Management

Regular vulnerability scanning and timely patch management are critical components of a robust security strategy. By continuously scanning for vulnerabilities in applications and infrastructure, organizations can proactively address potential threats. Patch management ensures that all systems are up to date with the latest security updates, minimizing the risk of exploitation.

Building a Culture of Security Awareness

Training and Resources for Development Teams on Security Practices

Fostering a culture of security awareness begins with providing training and resources for development teams. By educating team members on best practices and emerging threats, organizations can empower them to take ownership of security within their projects. Regular workshops and access to updated materials can enhance knowledge and skills across the board.

Encouraging Collaboration Between Development, Security, and Operations Teams

Collaboration between development, security, and operations teams is essential for a successful DevSecOps approach. By breaking down silos and promoting open communication, teams can work together to identify security needs and address them proactively. This collaborative effort enhances security posture and accelerates incident response.

Establishing Clear Security Policies and Incident Response Plans

Creating clear security policies and incident response plans is crucial for guiding teams in the event of a security incident. These documents should outline roles, responsibilities, and procedures to follow during a breach. Regularly reviewing and updating these plans ensures that organizations are prepared to handle potential threats effectively.

By implementing these DevSecOps practices for non-human identity security, organizations can create a more secure environment that minimizes risk and enhances overall resilience.

Centralized vs. decentralized identity management for microservices

In today’s digital landscape, understanding the differences between centralized and decentralized identity management for microservices is crucial for developers, businesses, and IT professionals. This webpage will explore the key concepts and benefits of each approach, helping you determine which identity management solution best fits your microservices architecture. You’ll discover how centralized identity management streamlines user authentication and access control, while decentralized systems enhance privacy and user autonomy. Whether you’re looking to improve security, scalability, or user experience, this comprehensive guide will equip you with the insights needed to make informed decisions about identity management in your microservices environment.

Introduction to Identity Management in Microservices

In the realm of software architecture, microservices have gained significant traction due to their flexibility, scalability, and resilience. Microservices architecture refers to a design style where applications are structured as a collection of loosely coupled services, each responsible for a specific function. This distributed nature of microservices introduces unique challenges, particularly in the context of identity management. Effective identity management is crucial for ensuring secure access to services and protecting sensitive user data in complex ecosystems.

When discussing identity management in microservices, two primary approaches emerge: centralized and decentralized identity management. Each method has its unique characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages that can significantly influence the security and performance of microservices-based applications.

Centralized Identity Management

Definition and Key Characteristics

Centralized identity management involves a single system or service that handles all identity and access management (IAM) functions. This centralized authority manages user identities, authentication, and authorization across multiple microservices.

Advantages

1. Simplified User Management and Provisioning: Centralized identity management allows for streamlined user onboarding and offboarding processes. Administrators can easily manage user accounts, permissions, and roles from a single dashboard, reducing administrative overhead.
   
2. Easier Compliance with Regulatory Requirements: Maintaining compliance with regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA is more straightforward when identity management is centralized. Organizations can implement consistent security policies and audit trails across all services.
   
3. Centralized Access Control and Monitoring: With a centralized approach, organizations can enforce access policies uniformly, ensuring that users have the appropriate permissions for each service. Monitoring user activities becomes easier, facilitating better security oversight.

Disadvantages

1. Single Point of Failure Risk: Centralized systems are susceptible to outages; if the identity provider goes down, access to all dependent services can be lost, disrupting operations.
   
2. Scalability Challenges as the System Grows: As user bases and services expand, a centralized identity management system may struggle to handle increased load, leading to performance issues.
   
3. Potential for Performance Bottlenecks: Heavy reliance on a single identity provider can create bottlenecks, especially during peak usage times, affecting the overall responsiveness of the application.

Decentralized Identity Management

Definition and Key Characteristics

Decentralized identity management distributes the responsibility of managing identities across multiple services or nodes. Each microservice can independently manage its own user identities, authentication, and access controls, minimizing reliance on a single identity provider.

Advantages

1. Reduced Risk of Single Points of Failure: By decentralizing identity management, the risk of one service affecting the availability of others is significantly lowered. If one service fails, others can continue to function independently.
   
2. Enhanced Scalability and Performance: Decentralized systems can scale more effectively, as each service can manage its own user identities without depending on a central authority. This leads to improved performance and responsiveness.
   
3. Greater User Control and Privacy: Users have more control over their identities and data in a decentralized model. They can manage their credentials and personal information without relying on a central entity, enhancing privacy.

Disadvantages

1. Complexity in User Management and Provisioning: Managing user identities across multiple services can become complex, requiring robust coordination and synchronization mechanisms.
   
2. Challenges in Ensuring Consistent Security Policies: With multiple services managing their own identities, maintaining consistent security policies can be challenging, potentially leading to vulnerabilities.
   
3. Potential Difficulties in Interoperability Between Services: Decentralized systems might face challenges in ensuring that different services can communicate and trust each other’s identity management processes, which is critical for seamless user experiences.

Use Cases and Scenarios

Situations Favoring Centralized Identity Management

Centralized identity management is often ideal for small to medium-sized applications with limited user bases. In these scenarios, the simplicity of managing identities from a single point can save time and resources. Additionally, environments with stringent compliance requirements may benefit from centralized systems, as they allow for easier implementation of regulatory controls and audits.

Situations Favoring Decentralized Identity Management

Conversely, large-scale applications with diverse user bases require a more flexible approach. Decentralized identity management facilitates better scalability and performance in such environments. Systems that demand high availability and fault tolerance, such as critical financial or healthcare applications, also benefit from decentralization, as it mitigates the risks associated with single points of failure.

Conclusion

In summary, both centralized and decentralized identity management approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Centralized systems offer simplicity and ease of compliance, while decentralized systems provide enhanced scalability and user control. When choosing between these two models, organizations must consider their specific use cases, user base size, regulatory requirements, and long-term growth plans.

As technology continues to evolve, future trends in identity management for microservices are likely to focus on enhancing interoperability, improving user experience, and adopting emerging technologies such as blockchain for decentralized identity solutions. Organizations must stay informed about these trends to make the best decisions for their identity management strategies.

API gateway authentication for non-human identities

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on API gateway authentication for non-human identities, a critical aspect of modern digital security. As businesses increasingly rely on automated systems and applications to communicate, ensuring that these non-human entities—such as bots, microservices, and IoT devices—are securely authenticated is more important than ever. In this article, you’ll discover the key methods and best practices for implementing robust API gateway authentication, helping you protect your data and maintain seamless operations. Whether you’re a developer, IT professional, or business leader, you’ll gain valuable insights into securing your APIs against unauthorized access while optimizing performance.

Introduction to API Gateway Authentication

API gateways serve as a crucial component in microservices architecture, acting as a single entry point for multiple services. These gateways manage and route requests, perform load balancing, and handle security, among other functions. One of the key aspects of API gateways is authentication, which ensures that only authorized entities can access services. This is particularly important for non-human identities, such as applications, services, and IoT devices, which often require seamless access to APIs without human intervention.

However, the authentication of non-human identities presents unique challenges, such as ensuring security and managing diverse use cases across different platforms and devices. Understanding these challenges is vital for building robust and secure API gateways.

Understanding Non-Human Identities

Non-human identities refer to entities that interact with APIs without human involvement. Examples include microservices communicating with each other, automated scripts, and IoT devices like sensors and smart appliances. The authentication needs of non-human identities differ significantly from those of human users. While human authentication often relies on multi-factor authentication (MFA) and user credentials, non-human identities require mechanisms that can operate in a more automated and scalable manner.

Common use cases for non-human identities include automated data collection from sensors, service-to-service interactions in microservices architectures, and API calls made by backend applications to retrieve or update information. Understanding these use cases is essential for implementing effective authentication strategies.

Common Authentication Methods for Non-Human Identities

API Keys

API keys are a simple yet widely used method for authenticating non-human identities. An API key is a unique identifier passed along with API requests to verify the requesting party’s identity. They are commonly used in scenarios where a single service or application needs to authenticate itself to another.

Advantages and Limitations of API Keys
While API keys are easy to implement and manage, they come with limitations. They lack granularity in access control and can be easily compromised if not managed properly. Therefore, they are best suited for low-risk interactions or as part of a larger authentication strategy.

OAuth 2.0

OAuth 2.0 is a widely adopted framework for authorization that enables applications to obtain limited access to user accounts on an HTTP service. Although it is primarily designed for human users, OAuth 2.0 can also be effectively utilized for non-human clients by granting them access tokens that allow them to authenticate without needing to manage user credentials.

Scenarios Where OAuth 2.0 is Beneficial
OAuth 2.0 is particularly beneficial in scenarios where multiple services need to interact securely. For instance, it can be used in service-to-service communication where one service needs to call another on behalf of a user or itself.

JSON Web Tokens (JWT)

JSON Web Tokens (JWT) are another popular authentication method that provides a compact and self-contained way to securely transmit information between parties. A JWT consists of three parts: the header, payload, and signature, which together ensure the integrity and authenticity of the information.

Use of JWT for Secure Communication
JWTs are commonly used in microservices for secure communication, as they can be easily verified and decoded by different services without the need for central authentication. This makes them a versatile choice for non-human identity authentication in distributed systems.

Best Practices for Implementing API Gateway Authentication

To effectively implement API gateway authentication for non-human identities, it is essential to follow best practices:

• Use Strong, Unique Credentials Per Service: Each service should have its own unique credentials to minimize the risk of compromised access.
  
• Regular Rotation and Management of Authentication Secrets: Regularly updating authentication secrets helps mitigate risks associated with long-lived credentials.
  
• Monitoring and Logging Access Attempts for Security Audits: Keeping track of access attempts enables organizations to identify and respond to suspicious activities promptly.

Future Trends in API Gateway Authentication

The rise of machine identities is reshaping the landscape of API security. As more devices and services automate interactions, the need for secure, scalable authentication solutions becomes increasingly pressing.

Artificial intelligence is expected to play a significant role in enhancing authentication mechanisms, providing adaptive security measures that can respond to evolving threats in real time.

Moreover, evolving standards and protocols in API authentication are anticipated, leading to more robust frameworks that accommodate the complexities of modern service interactions. Keeping abreast of these trends will be crucial for organizations looking to secure their APIs effectively.

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Cloud-native non-human identity security

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on cloud-native non-human identity security, where we explore the crucial role of securing digital identities in modern cloud environments. As businesses increasingly rely on automation and AI, understanding how to protect non-human identities—like bots, APIs, and other automated systems—has never been more vital. In this page, you’ll discover effective strategies, best practices, and tools to safeguard these identities against evolving cyber threats, ensuring your cloud infrastructure remains secure and resilient. Dive in to learn how to enhance your organization’s security posture while optimizing your cloud-native applications.

Introduction to Cloud-native Non-Human Identity Security

In today’s ever-evolving digital landscape, the security of non-human identities in cloud-native environments has become critical. Cloud-native non-human identities refer to digital identities that are not directly associated with human users but are essential for automated processes, application integrations, and device interactions. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud services, understanding and securing these identities is paramount to mitigating potential security risks.

The importance of securing non-human identities cannot be overstated. With the rapid rise of automation and orchestration in cloud architectures, these identities often have extensive permissions and access rights, making them prime targets for cyberattacks. This article will explore the nuances of cloud-native non-human identity security, including its definition, types, challenges, best practices, and future trends.

Understanding Non-Human Identities

Types of Non-Human Identities

Non-human identities encompass a variety of entities that play pivotal roles in cloud applications. Common types include:

• Service Accounts: Automated accounts that allow applications to access resources and perform functions without human intervention.
  
• APIs (Application Programming Interfaces): Interfaces that enable different software applications to communicate and share data securely.
  
• IoT Devices: Internet of Things devices that require unique identities to interact with cloud services and each other.

Differences Between Human and Non-Human Identity Management

Unlike human identities, which can be managed through traditional user management practices, non-human identities require distinct strategies. Human accounts necessitate periodic password updates and user education, while non-human identities often operate on predefined roles and automated processes. This difference highlights the need for specialized identity management practices tailored to the unique requirements of non-human identities in cloud environments.

Use Cases and Examples of Non-Human Identities in Cloud Applications

Non-human identities are integral to various cloud applications. For instance, a service account may be used by a CI/CD pipeline to deploy applications automatically. APIs facilitate communication between cloud services and third-party applications, while IoT devices, such as smart thermostats, rely on secure identities to send data back to cloud servers. Each of these examples illustrates the critical role non-human identities play in ensuring seamless cloud operations.

Challenges in Securing Non-Human Identities

Increased Attack Surface Due to Automation and Scalability

The automation and scalability inherent in cloud environments significantly increase the attack surface for non-human identities. As organizations deploy more applications and services, the number of non-human identities proliferates, making it challenging to monitor and secure them effectively.

Vulnerabilities Associated with Hardcoded Credentials and Secrets

One of the most prevalent vulnerabilities in managing non-human identities is the use of hardcoded credentials and secrets. When developers embed credentials directly into code, it creates a security risk, as these hardcoded values can be easily extracted by malicious actors. This practice can lead to unauthorized access and data breaches.

Difficulty in Monitoring and Auditing Non-Human Identity Activities

Monitoring and auditing activities associated with non-human identities pose significant challenges. Traditional monitoring tools often struggle to differentiate between human and non-human activity, making it difficult to detect anomalies or potential security incidents. Without proper oversight, organizations may remain unaware of compromised identities or unauthorized access attempts.

Best Practices for Securing Non-Human Identities

Implementing Least Privilege Access Controls

One of the most effective strategies for securing non-human identities is to implement least privilege access controls. This practice ensures that each identity has only the permissions necessary to perform its functions, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access and reducing the potential impact of a security breach.

Utilizing Secrets Management and Rotation Strategies

To combat the risks associated with hardcoded credentials, organizations should adopt robust secrets management solutions. These tools securely store and manage sensitive information, such as API keys and passwords, and should include automated credential rotation strategies to ensure that credentials are updated regularly and remain secure.

Integrating Identity and Access Management (IAM) Solutions for Non-Human Identities

Integrating comprehensive identity and access management (IAM) solutions tailored for non-human identities is essential. These solutions provide centralized control over identity provisioning, access policies, and monitoring, helping organizations enforce security best practices across their cloud environments.

Future Trends in Cloud-native Non-Human Identity Security

The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Identity Security

As the threat landscape evolves, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in identity security will become increasingly significant. These technologies can enhance anomaly detection, automate threat responses, and improve the overall security posture of cloud-native environments by identifying patterns and behaviors indicative of potential security incidents.

Emerging Standards and Regulations Impacting Non-Human Identity Management

The landscape of standards and regulations surrounding identity management is continuously changing. Organizations must stay informed about emerging frameworks that govern non-human identity security to ensure compliance and mitigate risks associated with data privacy and security breaches.

Predictions for the Evolution of Security Technologies in Cloud Environments

Looking ahead, we can expect the evolution of security technologies to focus on enhancing automation, improving identity verification processes, and integrating more sophisticated monitoring capabilities. As organizations increasingly rely on cloud-native architectures, the emphasis on securing non-human identities will continue to grow, driving innovation in security solutions tailored to meet these challenges.

By understanding the importance of cloud-native non-human identity security and implementing best practices, organizations can significantly reduce risks and enhance their overall security posture in an increasingly automated and interconnected world.

Industrial IoT identity security

In today’s rapidly evolving industrial landscape, securing the Internet of Things (IoT) devices has become more critical than ever. Industrial IoT identity security focuses on protecting the identities of connected devices, ensuring that data remains safe and operations run smoothly. On this page, you will discover key strategies for implementing robust identity management systems, explore the latest technologies that enhance security, and learn best practices to mitigate risks associated with unauthorized access and data breaches. Whether you’re a business leader, IT professional, or simply interested in the future of industrial technology, this guide will equip you with the knowledge you need to safeguard your IoT infrastructure effectively.

Introduction to Industrial IoT Identity Security

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Industry 4.0, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has become a cornerstone for enhancing operational efficiency and productivity. However, as IIoT technologies proliferate, the need for robust identity security measures becomes increasingly critical. This section delves into the definition of IIoT, highlights the importance of identity security in these ecosystems, and outlines the risks associated with inadequate identity management.

Definition of Industrial IoT (IIoT)

Industrial IoT (IIoT) refers to the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies into industrial applications, enabling machines, systems, and processes to connect, communicate, and analyze data. IIoT encompasses a wide range of sectors, including manufacturing, energy, transportation, and healthcare, facilitating real-time monitoring and automation. By leveraging sensors, devices, and data analytics, IIoT aims to optimize operations, reduce downtime, and enhance productivity.

Importance of Identity Security in IIoT Ecosystems

Identity security is paramount in IIoT ecosystems, where multiple devices and users interact and share sensitive data. Ensuring that only authorized individuals and devices have access to specific resources mitigates risks such as data breaches, operational disruptions, and potential system manipulations. Effective identity security not only protects valuable assets but also fosters trust among stakeholders, ensuring compliance with industry regulations and standards.

Overview of the Risks Associated with Poor Identity Management

Poor identity management can expose IIoT systems to numerous risks, including unauthorized access, data leaks, and cyberattacks. With many connected devices operating within a network, the potential for exploitation increases significantly. Inadequate identity security measures can lead to costly downtime and loss of sensitive information, making it imperative for businesses to prioritize robust identity management strategies.

Key Concepts in Identity Security for IIoT

Understanding key concepts in identity security is essential for implementing effective measures in IIoT environments. This section covers Identity and Access Management (IAM) principles, the relevance of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and the significance of device identification and authentication.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) Principles

Identity and Access Management (IAM) encompasses the policies, technologies, and processes that ensure the right individuals and devices have appropriate access to resources. IAM principles involve the creation, management, and enforcement of user identities and permissions across the IIoT ecosystem. By establishing clear IAM protocols, organizations can enhance security, streamline operations, and reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Its Relevance

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) assigns permissions based on user roles within an organization. This approach simplifies access management by ensuring users have access only to the resources necessary for their roles. In IIoT environments, RBAC is particularly relevant, as it helps manage the diverse range of users and devices while minimizing the risk of unauthorized access. Implementing RBAC effectively can improve security posture and operational efficiency.

The Significance of Device Identification and Authentication

Device identification and authentication are critical components of IIoT identity security. Each device must be uniquely identified and authenticated before gaining access to the network. This process ensures that only legitimate devices can communicate and share data, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities. Robust authentication mechanisms, such as digital certificates and cryptographic keys, play a vital role in securing IIoT environments.

Challenges in Implementing Identity Security

While the importance of identity security in IIoT is clear, several challenges arise during implementation. This section discusses the diverse range of devices and legacy systems, scalability issues in identity management solutions, and the complexity of managing multiple users and permissions.

Diverse Range of Devices and Legacy Systems

The IIoT landscape includes a wide variety of devices, from modern sensors to legacy machinery. Integrating identity security measures across this diverse range can be challenging, as legacy systems may not support contemporary security protocols. Ensuring compatibility and seamless integration is crucial for maintaining a secure and cohesive identity management framework.

Scalability Issues in Identity Management Solutions

As IIoT environments grow, scalability becomes a significant challenge for identity management solutions. Organizations must ensure that their identity security measures can adapt to increasing numbers of devices and users without compromising performance or security. Choosing scalable solutions that can evolve with the organization’s needs is essential for long-term success.

Complexity of Managing Multiple Users and Permissions

Managing multiple users and permissions in IIoT ecosystems can be complex, particularly in organizations with diverse teams and roles. Ensuring that users have the appropriate access while maintaining security can lead to administrative burdens and potential security gaps. Implementing automated identity management solutions can help streamline this process and reduce the risk of human error.

Best Practices for Ensuring Identity Security

To fortify identity security in IIoT environments, organizations should adopt best practices that encompass a range of strategies. This section outlines the importance of multi-factor authentication (MFA), regular audits and monitoring of identity access, and the utilization of encryption and secure communication protocols.

Implementing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) adds an extra layer of security by requiring users to provide multiple forms of verification before accessing sensitive resources. By combining something the user knows (password), something the user has (smartphone), and something the user is (biometric data), MFA significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access, making it a crucial component of IIoT identity security.

Regular Audits and Monitoring of Identity Access

Conducting regular audits and monitoring of identity access is essential for identifying potential vulnerabilities and ensuring compliance with security policies. Organizations should implement tools that track user activities, access patterns, and anomalies. This proactive approach allows for timely interventions and helps maintain a secure IIoT environment.

Utilizing Encryption and Secure Communication Protocols

Encryption and secure communication protocols are vital for protecting data transmitted across IIoT networks. By encrypting sensitive information and using secure protocols such as TLS (Transport Layer Security), organizations can safeguard data from interception and unauthorized access. Implementing these security measures is fundamental to maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of IIoT communications.

Future Trends in Industrial IoT Identity Security

As IIoT continues to evolve, several trends are expected to shape the future of identity security in this domain. This section explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the evolution of decentralized identity frameworks, and predictions for regulatory changes and compliance requirements.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are poised to revolutionize identity security in IIoT by automating threat detection and response. AI-driven solutions can analyze vast amounts of data to identify anomalies and potential security breaches in real-time. By leveraging predictive analytics, organizations can proactively address security threats, enhancing overall resilience.

Evolution of Decentralized Identity Frameworks

Decentralized identity frameworks are gaining traction as a means to enhance privacy and security in IIoT ecosystems. These frameworks allow users to control their own identity information without relying on centralized authorities. By implementing decentralized identity solutions, organizations can improve security, reduce identity theft risks, and enhance user trust.

Predictions for Regulatory Changes and Compliance Requirements

As the IIoT landscape continues to grow, regulatory changes and compliance requirements are expected to evolve. Organizations must stay abreast of emerging regulations concerning data protection, privacy, and identity security. Proactive compliance strategies will be essential for mitigating

NPE identity governance and administration (IGA)

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on NPE Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), where we delve into the essential aspects of managing digital identities and ensuring compliance in today’s complex IT landscape. In this resource, you’ll discover how NPE IGA solutions empower organizations to efficiently control user access, enhance security, and streamline identity management processes. We’ll explore key concepts, best practices, and the latest technologies that drive effective identity governance, making it easier for businesses to protect sensitive data while fostering collaboration. Whether you’re an IT professional or a business leader, this page will provide valuable insights into optimizing your identity governance strategy.

Introduction to NPE Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations face increasing challenges in managing identities and ensuring secure access to sensitive information. Non-Persistent Entity (NPE) Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) emerges as a crucial solution to these challenges. NPE IGA not only facilitates effective identity management but also enhances security, compliance, and operational efficiency.

Definition of NPE (Non-Persistent Entity)

A Non-Persistent Entity (NPE) refers to a digital identity that is not permanently retained within a system. Instead, these identities are created, utilized, and then deleted based on specific needs, often aligning with temporary roles or projects. This model allows organizations to manage identities dynamically, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and ensuring access is granted only when necessary.

Overview of Identity Governance and Administration

Identity Governance and Administration is a framework that governs user identities and their access to resources within an organization. It encompasses policies, technologies, and processes aimed at managing and securing user identities throughout their lifecycle. IGA ensures that the right individuals have the right access to the right resources at the right time, enhancing overall security and compliance.

Importance of IGA in Modern Organizations

In the era of digital transformation, organizations are increasingly reliant on data and cloud services, making IGA more critical than ever. Effective IGA helps mitigate risks associated with data breaches, ensures compliance with various regulations (such as GDPR and HIPAA), and enhances operational efficiency by streamlining identity management processes. Without a robust IGA framework, organizations may face significant security vulnerabilities and compliance challenges.

Key Components of NPE IGA

Identity Lifecycle Management

Identity Lifecycle Management involves the comprehensive management of user identities from creation to deletion. NPE IGA automates this process, ensuring that identities are provisioned, modified, and deactivated efficiently as users’ roles change within the organization.

Onboarding and Offboarding Processes

Effective onboarding and offboarding processes are essential for maintaining security and compliance. NPE IGA streamlines these processes by automating access provisioning for new employees and revoking access for departing employees, thereby minimizing the risk of unauthorized access.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

RBAC is a critical component of NPE IGA, allowing organizations to assign access rights based on users’ roles within the organization. This ensures that individuals have access only to the information necessary for their job functions, thereby enhancing security.

Access Certification and Compliance

Regular access certification is vital in maintaining compliance with regulations. NPE IGA facilitates periodic reviews of user access rights, ensuring that only authorized users have access to sensitive data and resources.

Policy Management

Policy management within NPE IGA involves establishing and enforcing access policies that govern user permissions. Automating policy enforcement helps organizations maintain consistent security measures and ensures compliance with internal and external regulations.

Benefits of Implementing NPE IGA

Enhanced Security

Implementing NPE IGA significantly enhances security by reducing the risk of unauthorized access and protecting sensitive data. By managing identities dynamically, organizations can ensure that access is granted only when necessary.

Improved Operational Efficiency

NPE IGA streamlines user provisioning processes, reducing administrative overhead and allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than manual identity management tasks.

Better Compliance Management

With NPE IGA, organizations can more effectively manage compliance with various regulations. The system assists with audits and reporting, ensuring that organizations maintain adherence to necessary legal standards.

Challenges and Considerations

Integration with Existing Systems

One of the primary challenges in implementing NPE IGA is ensuring compatibility with existing legacy systems. Organizations must consider the need for API support and data synchronization to facilitate seamless integration.

User Adoption and Training

For NPE IGA to be effective, user buy-in is crucial. Implementing comprehensive training programs helps ensure that employees understand how to use the system effectively and recognize its importance in maintaining security.

Continuous Monitoring and Adaptation

Organizations must continuously monitor and adapt their IGA practices to address evolving security threats. Regular updates to policies and procedures are necessary to stay ahead of potential vulnerabilities.

Future Trends in NPE IGA

Increased Automation and AI Integration

The future of NPE IGA will likely see increased automation and the integration of artificial intelligence. Machine learning can play a significant role in threat detection and automating compliance checks, enhancing overall security.

Focus on Zero Trust Security Framework

As cyber threats become more sophisticated, organizations are shifting towards a Zero Trust Security Framework. This approach emphasizes continuous verification of user identity, ensuring that access is granted based on real-time assessments rather than static permissions.

Enhanced User Experience

Future NPE IGA systems will prioritize user experience by simplifying interfaces and providing self-service capabilities for access requests. This not only improves user satisfaction but also reduces the administrative burden on IT teams.

Conclusion

In conclusion, NPE Identity Governance and Administration is essential for modern organizations seeking to enhance security, streamline operations, and ensure compliance. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the importance of implementing robust IGA frameworks will only grow. By embracing the future trends of automation, AI integration, and a Zero Trust approach, organizations can effectively safeguard their assets and adapt to emerging challenges in identity management.