Credentials as Unique Identifiers: A Practical Guide to Non-Human Identity Inventories

Read full article here: https://blog.gitguardian.com/leveraging-credentials-as-unique-identifiers/?utm_source=nhimg

Non-Human Identities (NHIs) such as API keys, service accounts, tokens, and machine credentials,now outnumber human identities by more than 50 to one. Yet most enterprises lack visibility into these identities, leaving them unmanaged, over-permissioned, and ripe for compromise. With 83% of breaches now involving stolen or mismanaged credentials, organizations must rethink how they track and govern machine identities.

A new approach is emerging: treating credentials themselves as unique identifiers, the “UUIDs” of modern workloads. By anchoring machine identity to its authenticating secret, security teams gain a consistent way to discover, monitor, and govern NHIs across fractured environments—whether in Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, or legacy systems.

Why Credentials Are the New Identity Marker

Traditional IAM for humans relies on persistent traits like names or biometrics. Machines, however, authenticate solely through secrets such as API keys, JWTs, and bearer tokens. These credentials already function as cryptographic fingerprints across distributed systems, making them natural anchors for identity observability.

By treating credentials as identity markers, organizations can:

• Unify fragmented inventories of machine identities.
• Trace activity back to specific jobs, commits, or workloads.
• Enforce Zero Trust by continuously validating usage, rotation, and expiration.

This creates a single lens for NHI governance, regardless of cloud, container, or legacy system.

The Risk of Secrets Sprawl

Credentials are also the enterprise’s biggest liability. GitGuardian’s State of Secrets Sprawl 2025 found 23.8 million secrets leaked on GitHub in 2024, with 35% of private repositories containing sensitive credentials. Long-lived, orphaned, or abandoned secrets silently accumulate, offering attackers valid sessions with no accountability or oversight.

Breaches at Uber, the U.S. Treasury, and countless others prove how leaked or unmanaged machine secrets become low-friction entry points for attackers.

GitGuardian’s Cross-Environment NHI Inventory

GitGuardian extends beyond leaked secret detection to deliver a comprehensive NHI inventory platform, mapping every secret, whether in vaults,

pipelines, or cloud environments and tying it to contextual metadata such as ownership, lifespan, and scope.

Key capabilities include:

• Full-stack discovery of all secrets, not just leaked ones.
• Detection of redundant, orphaned, and zombie credentials.
• Unified governance dashboards with policy violations and risk scores.
• Lifecycle enforcement including rotation, expiration, and revocation.

This approach transforms fragmented credential sprawl into a centralized governance model for machine identities.

Towards NHI Governance and Zero Trust

Secrets aren’t just access keys, they are the mechanism that lets attackers impersonate trusted workloads. Without visibility into where those secrets live, how they’re used, and whether they’re still valid, organizations face silent compromise.

By treating secrets as unique identity markers, GitGuardian enables security teams to enforce Zero Trust for machine identities, eliminating ghost accounts, containing sprawl, and revoking compromised credentials before they become breach enablers.

Conclusion

The rise of NHIs has permanently reshaped enterprise identity security. Static, fragmented, and unmanaged credentials cannot keep pace with today’s SaaS, cloud, and AI-driven environments. By anchoring NHI governance to the very credentials machines use to operate, GitGuardian provides the visibility, accountability, and lifecycle management required to secure the modern identity surface.

Discover how GitGuardian can unify secrets security and NHI governance to protect your enterprise from the next credential-based attack.