NHI Security Best Practices 2025

Watch full video session here: https://www.andromedasecurity.com/videos/best-practices-for-nhi-security/?source=nhimg

While human identity security has matured over decades, NHI security remains fragmented, decentralized, and largely unmanaged, creating a vast, fast-growing attack surface.

In This session, Our Co-Founder, Kamal Muralidharan, explored why Non-Human Identities (NHIs) have become one of the most complex and urgent security challenges facing modern enterprises, also discussed the best practices to secure NHIs in your organization.

1. Human vs. Non-Human Identity Security

• Human identities:

  • Historically fragmented but now more centralized via Identity Providers (IdPs), IAM processes, MFA, and IGA workflows.

  • Still vulnerable (e.g., social engineering), but manageable due to standardized controls and lifecycle governance.

• Non-Human identities:

  • Completely decentralized and service-specific.

  • Each cloud or SaaS platform defines its own creation, authentication, and management mechanisms.

  • No universal standardization, making discovery, tracking, and governance extremely difficult.

2. Why NHIs Are Hard to Manage

• Explosion in types: API keys, service accounts, SSH keys, PKI certificates, etc. — often unique to each service.

• Decentralized creation: Developers in DevOps models create NHIs on-demand without central approval.

• Lifecycle blind spots:

  • No consistent tie between a human creator and the NHI they generated.

  • Credentials may persist after the creator leaves the company.

• Multi-environment sprawl: NHIs exist across cloud, SaaS, on-prem, and internal apps, often with no single inventory.

3. The NHI Access Model – Common Patterns

Any NHI use case can be generalized into:

• Target system (Cloud, SaaS, etc.)

• Resources (databases, storage buckets, compute instances, etc.)

• Entitlements (roles/permissions for that resource)

• Credential (API key, cert, token, etc. to prove identity)

• Client application (the system acting via the NHI to perform tasks)

4. Key Risk Areas and Challenges

a) Credentials

• Diversity: Wide range of formats and storage methods makes uniform governance hard.

• Duration:

  • Short-lived credentials (best practice, managed by provider) reduce exposure.

  • Long-lived/static credentials are still common due to tooling gaps or third-party integration needs.

• Rotation fragility: Automated rotation is ideal but often breaks legacy or non-compliant apps.

• Vaulting: Secure check-in/out and rotation are essential, but adoption is uneven.

b) Clients

• Even “secure” deployments (e.g., instance profiles in AWS) can be exploited if the underlying system is compromised.

• Credential-based vs. trust-based:

  • Trust relationships (e.g., AWS-to-AWS federation) remove explicit secrets but still carry risk if either side is compromised.

  • Requires behavioral monitoring and network/IP restrictions.

c) Entitlements

• Least privilege is critical — avoid admin rights for NHIs unless absolutely required.

• Over-permissive roles in CI/CD or automation accounts create catastrophic risk if compromised.

• One-to-one mapping between NHIs and applications improves monitoring and behavioral baselining.

• Thousands of available permissions (e.g., 17,000+ in AWS) make entitlement scoping a non-trivial task.

5. Best Practices & Strategic Priorities

1. Focus on entitlements — your strongest area of direct control.

2. Use short-lived, non-human-visible credentials where possible.

3. Secure long-lived credentials via vaulting, strict rotation, and access logging.

4. Establish clear NHI ownership tied to human creators.

5. Avoid sharing NHIs across multiple apps to improve incident response.

6. Implement behavioral analysis for anomaly detection, especially in trusted-relationship scenarios.

7. Apply defense-in-depth (“onion peel”) — multiple layers of security controls.

6. Conclusion

NHIs are now a core element of enterprise identity security — but lack the maturity, standardization, and governance models of human identity programs. The path forward requires:

• Visibility and inventory.

• Standardized lifecycle management tied to human owners.

• Strong entitlement hygiene.

• Secure credential practices adapted to modern DevOps and multi-cloud realities.

Andromeda Security positions itself as an identity platform addressing both human and non-human identity management holistically, applying least-privilege principles, governance, and automation.