Challenges with NHI lifecycles

Read full article here: https://blog.gitguardian.com/identity-lifecycle-management-for-nhis/?source=nhimg

In modern enterprises, non-human identities (NHIs) — like service accounts, API keys, and tokens — now vastly outnumber human identities. Yet when it comes to identity lifecycle management (ILM), they often fall through the cracks.

While we’ve made huge strides in managing human credentials through centralized IAM, secrets vaulting, and zero trust access, NHIs remain a blind spot. The result? Shadow credentials, over-privileged service accounts, and zombie tokens that quietly undermine enterprise security.

Why NHIs Are Harder to Manage

Unlike human users, NHIs are:

• Scattered across cloud providers, APIs, and CI/CD pipelines

• Often static, hardcoded, or hidden in legacy scripts

• Created ad hoc by developers or systems, with unclear ownership

• Rarely monitored for usage, age, or privilege creep

In short, NHIs are easier to create than to manage, and most organizations have no centralized inventory or visibility.

Common Challenges in the NHI Lifecycle

Let’s break down where organizations typically struggle:

1. Auditing & Monitoring

Every NHI ties into a complex web of third-party tools and cloud environments. Without consistent logging or observability, you risk:

• Missed detection of over-privileged NHIs

• Forgotten or leaked tokens living in source code

• No visibility into usage behavior or last rotation

2. Secret Rotation

Rotating secrets is tough when:

• There’s no owner to take responsibility

• The credential isn’t vaulted or centrally managed

• Rotation might cause service downtime
  Without automation or detection, exposed secrets can linger for months or even years.

3. Fragmented Tooling

Most enterprises rely on multiple vaults, password managers, and config tools, leading to:

• Siloed secrets

• No single source of truth

• Inability to link usage to owners or services

4. Decommissioning

Unlike human offboarding, NHIs rarely follow clean lifecycle events. Services are retired, engineers move on, and credentials stay active — often indefinitely. These "zombie NHIs" pose serious risk, especially when they retain access to sensitive systems.

Best Practices for Managing NHIs Effectively

To address these challenges, organizations need to rethink how they manage machine identities across their lifecycle:

• Centralize secret storage using modern vaults that support automation

• Inventory all NHIs, not just the ones you know about — including in CI logs, Git repos, and messaging tools

• Tag ownership to every credential and establish accountability

• Audit permissions vs. actual usage to reduce excess access

• Enable dynamic or auto-rotated secrets to reduce exposure windows

• Continuously monitor for anomalies, like credentials used at odd times or from new locations

• Set expiration and review policies to retire unused identities before they become attack vectors

How GitGuardian Can Help

While multiple vendors are tackling pieces of the NHI lifecycle, GitGuardian is one of the few platforms focused specifically on non-human identity governance. With features like:

• Secret discovery across code, pipelines, and infrastructure

• Contextual insights (e.g., active, exposed, vaulted, unused)

• Ownership mapping and audit tracking

• Secret manager integrations to verify vaulting and rotation

GitGuardian helps reduce NHI risk by giving security teams what they’ve been missing: visibility and control.