Topic starter
06/07/2026 9:35 am
TL;DR: Non-human identities are growing far faster than human ones, with complex hybrid and multi-cloud estates making visibility, rotation, offboarding, and least privilege hard to enforce, according to Token Security. The core issue is not discovery alone but governance that still assumes static, human-paced access lifecycles.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Token Security: “Top 10 Non-Human Identity Risks to Recognize and Mitigate”.
By the numbers:
- As the number of non-human identities grows faster than human ones, the ratio is about 1:10 according to Microsoft research cited by Token Security.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when non-human identities are not offboarded properly?
A: Orphaned NHIs remain valid long after the workload or integration they served is gone, which gives attackers a durable access path.
Q: What problem does ownership attribution solve for service accounts and API keys?
A: It closes the gap between exposure detection and accountable remediation.
Q: How should security teams handle secrets they cannot confidently map to an NHI?
A: Treat the secret as an unresolved governance item, not an immediate rotation candidate.
Practitioner guidance
- Assign explicit ownership to every NHI Map each service account, API key, token, and certificate to a named owner who is responsible for lifecycle decisions, usage review, and deletion when the business need ends.
- Tighten offboarding for machine identities When an employee leaves or a project closes, review the NHIs they created or managed and either reassign ownership or revoke them immediately if they are no longer needed.
- Reduce secret spread across storage locations Scan repositories, password managers, endpoints, and secret stores for duplicated credentials and remove copies that are not required by the workload's trust boundary.
Bottom line: Non-human identity risk is fundamentally a lifecycle and scoping problem, not just a discovery problem.
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06/07/2026 9:50 am
Incomplete offboarding is a lifecycle failure, not just an administration gap. The control breaks because the business deactivates the human account but leaves the machine credential outside the leaver process. That means service accounts and API keys survive the person who created them, which severs ownership from access. The implication is that NHI governance must treat offboarding as an identity event for the credential itself, not only for the employee record.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: When does third-party NHI access become a governance problem?
A: It becomes a governance problem when vendor access is broad, long-lived, or poorly monitored, because the partner's identity can outlive the business need and blend into normal activity. Teams should review third-party scope, usage, and offboarding with the same discipline they apply to internal machine identities.
👉 Read our full editorial: Top 10 non-human identity risks and the controls that fail