How to Secure Non-Human Identities in Modern Infrastructure

Read full article here: https://goteleport.com/blog/your-infrastructure-has-a-non-human-trust-problem/?sourc=nhimg

Modern infrastructure is no longer driven primarily by human operators, it’s powered by non-human identities (NHIs) such as CI/CD runners, bots, IaC tools, federated workloads, and increasingly, AI agents executing tasks via prompt-driven automation. While humans authenticate through SSO and MFA, most NHIs still operate with static credentials, broad privileges, and little oversight, creating significant security and resiliency risks.

Teleport’s Machine & Workload Identity Platform directly addresses this trust gap by replacing static secrets with short-lived, cryptographic identities and unified access controls. This enables secure, auditable, and scalable automation across all NHI use cases, reducing the attack surface while maintaining operational velocity.

Key NHI Security Challenges

• Static, long-lived credentials in automation pipelines.

• Over-privileged service accounts in IaC workflows.

• Complex, error-prone multi-cloud federation with inconsistent identity standards.

• Unverified AI and MCP actions with unclear provenance.

Core Teleport Use Cases

1. CI/CD Pipeline Security – Issues short-lived certificates to runners and bots, eliminating API keys, SSH keys, and kubeconfigs while ensuring every action is time-bound and logged.

2. Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Hardening – Provides ephemeral credentials for Terraform, Pulumi, and CloudFormation deployments, enforcing least privilege and per-job identity governance.

3. Federated Multi-Cloud Access – Acts as a unified identity authority, issuing standard cryptographic identities (e.g., x.509 w/ SPIFFE IDs) for consistent workload authentication across AWS, GCP, Azure, and edge environments.

4. Securing Model Context Protocol (MCP) & AI Agents – Authenticates every AI-driven action with scoped, short-lived identities, ensuring full traceability and zero-trust boundaries for prompt-driven automation.

Business Impact

By treating NHIs as first-class citizens in identity governance, Teleport enables:

• Elimination of static secrets from infrastructure.

• Full auditability of machine-to-machine and AI-driven actions.

• Stronger compliance posture for frameworks like SOC 2, PCI DSS, and DORA.

• Improved resiliency through centralized, role-based, and time-bound access control.

Bottom line

As NHIs rapidly outnumber human identities in modern environments, securing them with ephemeral, cryptographic trust is no longer optional—it’s a baseline requirement for resilient, compliant, and scalable infrastructure operations.