Securing the Future: Rethinking Identity for AI Agents and Non-Human Identities

Read full article here: https://www.unosecur.com/blog/rethinking-identity-for-ai-agents-and-other-non-human-identities/?source=nhimg

When a non-human identity (NHI) such as an AI agent calls your systems, authentication is no longer about MFA, it’s about machine-native identity verification.
Service accounts, workloads, bots, and agents all operate non-interactively, relying on policy, federation, and attestation instead of human-driven challenges.

This shift is not optional: as AI agents become first-class participants across enterprise systems, identity must evolve from human MFA to short-lived, traceable, and policy-driven credentials with full lifecycle governance.

Why MFA Doesn’t Fit NHIs

MFA assumes an interactive human user. Bots and agents authenticate through non-interactive flows such as OAuth 2.0 client credentials, workload identities, or managed service principals. Adding MFA challenges breaks automation and provides no assurance about the software’s provenance.

Instead, governance comes from:

• Federated trust (STS, workload federation, managed identities)
• Context-aware policy enforcement (risk, attributes, environment)
• Attestation (proving runtime and code origin, not just token possession)

Retire Static Secrets

Static credentials, hardcoded API keys, long-lived tokens, create persistent risk. The modern alternative is federation + short-lived credentials, minted on demand:

• AWS STS for temporary roles
• IAM Roles Anywhere for workloads outside AWS
• Entra Workload Identity Federation for service principals
• Managed Identities that remove secret management overhead

This reduces blast radius, removes rotation toil, and aligns with Zero Trust’s “never trust, always verify” principle.

Proving Software Identity

Even short-lived tokens only prove possession. To prevent impersonation and drift, systems must also prove what they are.

This is where SPIFFE/SPIRE comes in:

• SVIDs: cryptographic workload identities automatically rotated as short-lived X.509 certs
• mTLS: mutual TLS ensures service-to-service authentication
• Node & workload attestation: identity anchored in runtime properties like image digest, namespace, or cluster

Together, these give machine-native assurance far stronger than passwordless human flows.

Governing the Lifecycle

Identity doesn’t end at authentication. A Zero Trust approach requires continuous governance across the entire NHI lifecycle:

1. Ownership & Metadata: Assign a human owner, track purpose, environment, and sensitivity.
2. Least Privilege: Scope permissions tightly; support JIT (Just-in-Time) elevation.
3. Evidence & Audit: Log every token, API call, and policy decision—tie them back to a unique NHI.
4. De-provisioning: Expire and remove identities when projects end, preventing orphaned accounts.

Frameworks like CISA’s Zero Trust Maturity Model and NIST SP 800-207 emphasize that identity is continuous, dynamic, and evidence-based.

What Good Looks Like

A modern NHI security posture means:

• App-only flows with OAuth 2.0 or mTLS where no human is in the loop.
• Delegated OAuth tokens for agents acting on behalf of humans.
• Temporary, federated credentials instead of stored keys.
• Runtime attestation and cryptographic workload identity.
• Full lifecycle governance: ownership, rotation, expiry, audit, and de-provisioning.

Bottom Line

Securing non-human identities means swapping human MFA prompts for automation-native identity:
short-lived federation, workload attestation, continuous policy, and audit-ready governance.
Done well, this shrinks the blast radius, eliminates standing privilege, and gives you verifiable, Zero Trust-aligned assurance that every machine action is both trusted and compliant.