The OWASP Top 10 for NHI Exposes the Core Risks of AI, Automation, and Cloud Workloads

Read full article here: https://www.unosecur.com/blog/owasp-top-10-for-non-human-identities-nhi-why-securing-machine-identities-is-now-mission-critical/?utm_source=nhimg

Modern infrastructure no longer runs on human users. It runs on machines. API keys, cloud roles, OAuth applications, workload identities, service accounts, bots, and autonomous agents silently authenticate billions of times per day across CI/CD pipelines, microservices, cloud workloads, and SaaS ecosystems. These Non-Human Identities (NHIs) now outnumber human identities by more than 45:1 in large enterprises, creating an invisible security perimeter that most organizations still cannot see, measure, or control.

While enterprises have matured human identity security through MFA, SSO, passwordless access, and UEBA, the machine identity layer remains largely unmanaged. Compromised keys, forgotten service accounts, overprivileged OAuth apps, and hardcoded secrets have repeatedly led to large-scale cloud breaches.

The OWASP NHI Top 10 (2025 Initial Edition) was created to confront this strategic blind spot. It is the first vendor-neutral global standard dedicated to machine identity security and highlights real-world incidents where insecure NHIs triggered data loss, supply-chain compromise, or massive lateral cloud access.

At Unosecur, identity has always been the control plane of the cloud. The OWASP NHI Top 10 reinforces a reality we observe daily: automation has outpaced identity governance, and securing human users alone no longer protects the enterprise.

Why NHIs Matter More Than Ever

Three industry shifts explain why NHI security has become a core cybersecurity priority:

1. Machines Now Hold the Most Privilege

Service accounts and automation workloads routinely possess admin-level access, often without MFA, token binding, session control, or behavioral context.

2. Automation Without Visibility Prevents Governance

Most security teams cannot answer basic questions:

• How many machine identities exist?
• What do they access?
• Who owns them?
• When were they last rotated?
  Without visibility, automation becomes blind, and governance becomes impossible.

3. Attacks on NHIs Are Faster and Harder to Detect

A leaked API key gives an attacker instant authenticated access. Machine traffic blends into normal automation events, resulting in:

• No login anomalies
• No MFA failures
• No user behavioral alerts

This is why machine-identity-based attacks dominate the cloud breach landscape.

The OWASP Top 10 for NHIs (2025)

Below is a refined and publication-ready breakdown of each risk category with real-world incidents.

Structural Challenges Exposed by OWASP NHI

The Top 10 reveals deeper systemic gaps:

• Lack of full NHI discovery and inventory
• Fragmented storage across vaults, IAMs, GitHub, and CI/CD
• Blind trust chains between workloads and SaaS
• Human engineering shortcuts (long-lived tokens, shared accounts)
• Identity-not-network as the true perimeter

Machine-identity security is now a board-level topic because these risks scale silently.

How Unosecur Operationalizes the OWASP NHI Framework

Unosecur treats NHIs as first-class citizens of the identity plane, combining:

• Identity discovery
• Access governance
• Secrets posture management
• ITDR for machine identities
• AI-driven risk prioritization

Conclusion: The Enterprise Perimeter Is Now Identity — and Most of It Is Machine

Machine identities are the backbone of automation, CI/CD, SaaS integration, and agentic AI systems. They authenticate more frequently, hold more privilege, and move more data than human users — yet continue to be the most undersecured layer in the cloud stack.

The OWASP NHI Top 10 is a wake-up call for the industry.
The organizations that will withstand the next generation of cyberattacks are those that treat every identity — human and non-human — as a high-value attack surface.

With full visibility, automated governance, and identity-centric threat detection across cloud and SaaS environments, Unosecur enables enterprises to secure every machine identity everywhere — at scale, by design, and without slowing innovation.

Because the perimeter is no longer a place.
The perimeter is identity. And most of those identities are machines.