SlashID ODPR Framework for Securing Non-Human Identities

Learn more about our framework here: https://www.slashid.com/blog/nhi-security/?source=nhimg

In today’s cloud-driven world, non-human identities (NHIs)—like service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, and automation scripts—are growing fast. In many large organizations, they now outnumber human identities by 50 to 1. The problem? These machine identities often don’t get the same security attention as user accounts. They're highly privileged, rarely monitored, and easy for attackers to exploit. Just look at recent key breaches at Microsoft, Cloudflare, Dropbox, and Hugging Face—all tied back to weak or misused NHIs.

To address this rising threat, SlashID introduces the ODPR Framework—a four-phase strategy designed to Observe, Detect, Prevent, and Remediate identity-based risks that stem from unsecured machine and workload identities. Unlike malware-based threats, identity-based attacks require a fundamentally different response approach, one focused on visibility, governance, and precision containment.

Key Takeaways:

Observe

• Build a centralized inventory of NHIs across cloud, containers, microservices, and SaaS.

• Identify over-privileged credentials and map transitive trust relationships.

• Eliminate NHI sprawl across silos to empower security, DevOps, and compliance teams with unified visibility.

Detect

• Go beyond static scans: implement real-time detection of suspicious or anomalous NHI behavior.

• Customize severity scoring based on environment context.

• Integrate alerts into SIEMs, Slack, email, or custom pipelines for fast incident response.

Prevent

• Minimize the attack surface by tokenizing credentials and removing secrets from code/config files.

• Apply fine-grained OAuth2 scopes to reduce permission overreach.

• Enforce conditional access controls for all machine interactions with sensitive data or systems.

Remediate

• Assume breach: implement automated credential rotation, access revocation, and privilege drops in real time.

• Ensure your systems can contain lateral movement and identify potential persistence attempts.

• Learn from high-profile breaches (e.g., Cloudflare’s overlooked tokens) to understand the cost of missed remediations.

Why It Matters

As NHIs continue to scale exponentially, they’re becoming the primary vector for lateral movement and initial access in modern attacks. Traditional human-centric identity tools fall short in securing these automated accounts. The ODPR framework offers a pragmatic, structured methodology to close this security gap—starting with visibility and ending with incident containment.

Bottom Line

Organizations that implement the ODPR model can proactively reduce breach risk, improve audit readiness, and strengthen NHI governance—without slowing down innovation or operations.