Understanding NHI Governance: The Overlooked Layer of Identity Security

Read full article here: https://blog.gitguardian.com/identities-do-not-exist-in-a-vacuum/?utm_source=nhimg

In today’s cloud-native environments, non-human identities (NHIs)—including workloads, service accounts, APIs, bots, and IoT devices—perform the vast majority of automated actions. Yet, most organizations have little visibility into how these identities are created, what they access, or even whether they should still exist.
GitGuardian’s recent launch of Non-Human Identity (NHI) Security introduces a new governance framework built on two pillars: Secrets Security and NHI Governance. Together, they address a critical gap in enterprise identity programs—the lack of contextual understanding around the lifecycle, purpose, and relationships of non-human identities.

By mapping every NHI through its secrets, permissions, and interdependencies, GitGuardian helps organizations answer the most fundamental governance question: Does this identity need to exist?

The Nature of Non-Human Identities

A non-human identity is any entity capable of performing an action within a system without direct human intervention. These include Kubernetes pods, CI/CD pipelines, IoT sensors, and chatbots.
What unites them all is interaction—each communicates with another service or system through authenticated channels. This means that every NHI depends on secrets to function: API keys, tokens, certificates, or cryptographic credentials that enable secure, trusted communication.

In modern infrastructure, these relationships form a dense web of dependencies. Every NHI becomes a node in a larger system of trust, where misconfigurations or forgotten identities can easily turn into critical vulnerabilities.

Why Governance Begins with Secrets

Every secure NHI starts with a secret, the credential that authenticates it. Tracking where these secrets reside—inside vaults like CyberArk Conjur, AWS Secrets Manager, or HashiCorp Vault, or outside them in plaintext—provides the foundation for NHI discovery and classification.

While vaults offer a secure, centralized way to store secrets, most organizations use multiple vaults or have unmanaged secrets scattered across codebases and configurations. GitGuardian bridges this gap by identifying, mapping, and correlating all secrets across the enterprise—both within and outside managed vaults.
This visibility enables teams to reconstruct the identity graph of their infrastructure, linking each secret to its owning NHI and understanding its role in the environment.

The Human Link Behind Every Machine Identity

No machine identity appears on its own. Every NHI and its associated secret originate from a human action—a developer, engineer, or automation script that created or deployed it.
Effective NHI governance must therefore trace each secret to its creator and purpose, establishing accountability for credential sprawl and ownership gaps.

GitGuardian’s ability to correlate secrets with their code history, metadata, and creation timestamps enables organizations to uncover these origin stories. Understanding who created a secret and when it entered the ecosystem helps define the beginning of the NHI lifecycle, a crucial step toward complete lifecycle governance.

Permissions, Scope, and Risk

Every NHI secret carries a set of permissions—defining what actions the identity can perform and which systems it can access.
Over-privileged or misconfigured secrets dramatically increase the blast radius of a potential compromise. If a single API key allows write access to customer data or control over production systems, its exposure becomes a high-severity breach vector.

GitGuardian’s Secrets Analyzer adds critical context to detected credentials, revealing associated permissions and potential impact. When a secret is leaked or compromised, this insight helps teams immediately assess exposure, revoke credentials, and rotate them—often within minutes instead of days.

Continuous Rotation and Lifecycle Automation

Like passwords, machine secrets must not live forever. Each has a finite lifespan and must be rotated regularly to minimize risk.
However, manual rotation across thousands of NHIs and multiple vaults is operationally unsustainable. GitGuardian integrates with vault systems to automate the storage, synchronization, and rotation of secrets, ensuring that credentials remain short-lived and traceable.

For secrets existing outside vaults—or duplicated across systems—GitGuardian identifies and centralizes them for consistent rotation policies. This automation helps teams enforce rotation timelines based on age, sensitivity, and environment, transforming secret rotation from an ad hoc process into a predictable governance cycle.

End-of-Life and Decommissioning

Just as human identities are offboarded, machine identities must be retired when their associated systems or services are decommissioned.
Yet, many organizations overlook this step, leaving stale secrets active long after the NHI’s purpose has ended. These orphaned credentials often become prime targets for attackers.

By mapping the connections between NHIs, GitGuardian identifies inactive or disconnected identities whose secrets no longer support active services. Decommissioning them reduces storage overhead, eliminates blind spots, and strengthens overall security hygiene.

The Expanding Scale of NHI Management

In 2022, CyberArk reported a ratio of 45 non-human identities for every human user. Today, that number is closer to 100:1.
With such exponential growth, visibility, context, and automation are no longer optional—they are the only scalable means of managing identity lifecycles and minimizing risk.

GitGuardian’s NHI Security platform delivers full-cycle governance by linking discovery, classification, rotation, and decommissioning into a unified framework. It transforms fragmented secrets management into a holistic understanding of how identities interact, evolve, and expire.

Key Takeaways

• Every non-human identity connects to other systems; isolation is theoretical, not practical.
• All secure NHIs are defined by their secrets—visibility into these is the foundation of governance.
• Every machine identity traces back to a human action; accountability must be embedded.
• Permissions and privilege scoping determine the potential impact of compromise.
• Lifecycle automation—from rotation to decommissioning—is essential for resilience.
• NHI sprawl is accelerating; scalable governance demands automated mapping and context.

Conclusion

Non-human identities don’t exist in a vacuum—they form the connective tissue of digital infrastructure. As the number of NHIs continues to grow, so does the need for a governance-driven, lifecycle-aware approach to managing them.

GitGuardian’s NHI Governance capabilities offer organizations a way to see beyond secrets detection and toward a broader, contextual understanding of identity existence, purpose, and interconnection.
By automating discovery, mapping, rotation, and end-of-life processes, teams can finally replace reactive secrets management with proactive NHI lifecycle governance.

In a world where machine identities outnumber humans a hundred to one, securing them isn’t just a technical challenge—it’s the foundation of modern digital trust.