Three Frontiers, One Challenge: Securing Non-Human Identities in the Age of AI

Read full article here: https://www.oasis.security/blog/three-frontiers-one-challenge/?source=nhimg

Walking the floors at Identiverse 2025, one theme echoed across every keynote, booth, and hallway conversation: AI is here and it’s everywhere.

Behind the dazzling demos, the mechanics powering these systems felt familiar. Today’s AI agents still depend on the same identity constructs organizations have wrestled with for decades: service principals, managed identities, access keys, and API tokens. But the scale and stakes are now dramatically different.

The Three Frontiers of Non-Human Identity

1. Traditional IT - In the old world, service accounts quietly ran in batch jobs or cron scripts, with passwords hardcoded in config files. Risky, but contained.

2. Cloud-Native Infrastructure - In cloud-native environments, service accounts evolved into ephemeral workloads: Kubernetes pods, serverless functions, and infrastructure agents authenticating with STS or IMDS tokens. Automation multiplied identities, but at least they lived within known boundaries.

3. AI-Driven Workflows - In the AI era, non-human identities (NHIs) are exploding in both volume and complexity. Autonomous agents spin up in seconds, plug themselves into critical workflows, harvest sensitive data, and act with machine-level speed. Their credentials—often invisible to IAM teams, move across APIs, SaaS tools, and external vendors.

Real-World AI Identity Blind Spots

• Support chatbots authenticate with three separate secrets: a database password, an LLM service principal, and a CRM API token, all hidden from the user.
• “Bring your own model” plug-ins plant long-lived Foundry keys directly into SaaS platforms like Salesforce, creating shadow AI apps that spread tokens unchecked.
• Third-party AI add-ons like DeepSeek operate in external tenants, pulling enterprise data via OAuth tokens that remain opaque to the organization’s visibility.

One workflow, three NHIs. One OAuth consent, hundreds of invisible downstream actions. The attack surface grows silently, leaving teams blind to ownership, sprawl, and lifecycle risks.

The Identity Crisis: AI Moves Faster Than Guardrails

Together, these scenarios highlight a hard truth: AI is accelerating faster than existing security models. Credentials now sprawl across pods, SaaS wizards, and third-party tenants. Each unmanaged secret is a potential breach point, audit failure, or compliance nightmare.

What organizations need isn’t another point solution. They need a unifying control plane, a platform that can:

• Discover every non-human identity across environments.
• Secure those identities in real time.
• Govern their lifecycle from provisioning through decommissioning.

Oasis Security: See. Secure. Govern.

Oasis delivers exactly that through three pillars:

• SEE → Continuous discovery unifies all NHIs—service accounts, roles, service principals—into a single, owner-mapped inventory with context on purpose, privilege, and risk.
• SECURE → Real-time analytics expose stale secrets, toxic privilege combinations, and anomalous behaviors, with one-click remediation to shrink blast radius.
• GOVERN → Policy-driven orchestration enforces lifecycle rules (provision, rotate, attest, decommission) across directories, vaults, and AI services with a single policy language and audit trail.

From legacy servers to AI workloads, Oasis provides IAM teams with the visibility and guardrails needed to manage NHIs at enterprise scale—without slowing innovation.

Final Takeaway

AI is here, and so is the identity challenge it brings. NHIs, once hidden in scripts, now fuel the workflows of autonomous agents and AI-native enterprises. Without visibility and control, they become blind spots waiting to be exploited.

Oasis Security helps organizations see, secure, and govern NHIs in real time, putting order around AI adoption and enabling innovation with confidence.