How to mitigate the OWASP Top 10 Non-Human Identity risks 2025

Read full article here: https://www.akeyless.io/blog/securing-non-human-identities-how-akeyless-protects-against-the-owasp-top-10-nhi-risks-in-2025/?utm_source=nhimg

As enterprises expand automation, cloud adoption, and service-to-service integrations, Non-Human Identities (NHIs) — such as machine accounts, service credentials, and automation tokens — have become a primary target for attackers. The OWASP Top 10 NHI Risks for 2025 highlights the most urgent threats facing machine identities, service accounts, and automation credentials from improper offboarding to long-lived secrets.

This article illustrates how to  mitigate each OWASP-listed risk through ephemeral credentials, automated lifecycle management, least-privilege enforcement, and zero-trust principles — ensuring NHIs remain secure, compliant, and operationally efficient.

Using a fictional Silicon Valley software giant, Hooli, as a case study, the article demonstrates how Akeyless prevents real-world NHI misconfigurations and vulnerabilities across the full machine identity lifecycle.

Key OWASP Top 10 NHI Risks & How Akeyless Solves Them

1. Improper Offboarding – Automates NHI lifecycle expiration and revocation to prevent orphaned credentials.

2. Secret Leakage – Centralized, zero-knowledge encryption; secure CI/CD injection prevents hardcoding in code repos

3. Vulnerable Third-Party NHIs – Enforces least-privilege access and auto-rotates credentials for integrations

4. Insecure Authentication – Modern MFA and certificate-based authentication replace outdated methods

5. Overprivileged NHIs – Role-based and attribute-based controls ensure NHIs have only necessary permissions

6. Insecure Cloud Deployment Configurations – Replaces static credentials with short-lived, on-demand secrets

7. Long-Lived Secrets – Automated credential rotation and enforced expiration reduce prolonged exposure risk

8. Environment Isolation – Assigns unique secrets to dev, test, and production environments to prevent cross-environment compromise

9. NHI Reuse – Issues unique, ephemeral machine identities for each application instance to stop credential sharing

10. Human Use of NHIs – Enforces identity separation; humans use enterprise SSO while NHIs use secure API-based authentication

Why It Matters

NHIs often operate at higher privilege levels and without MFA, making them attractive and easy targets for attackers. Poor lifecycle management, secret sprawl, and credential reuse can lead to silent, long-term breaches. Akeyless removes these weaknesses by ensuring credentials are short-lived, scoped, and automatically managed, while providing centralized oversight and full audit trails for compliance.

Bottom Line

The OWASP Top 10 NHI Risks in 2025 underscore the urgent need for centralized, automated, and policy-driven NHI management. Akeyless equips enterprises to defend against credential-based attacks, eliminate identity sprawl, and maintain compliance — all while enabling innovation and rapid deployment at scale.