How should IAM teams use certifications like Common Criteria and ENS Alto?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Common Criteria and ENS Alto can be useful signals of product assurance, but IAM teams should not confuse certification with operational security. A certified product may still be deployed with excessive privileges, weak logging, poor secret handling, or gaps in supplier oversight. That distinction matters because most IAM risk sits in configuration, lifecycle control, and day-to-day administration, not only in the design claims covered by certification.

NHIMG research shows why this caution is warranted: 88.5% of organisations say their non-human IAM practices lag behind or only match human IAM, and 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges. That means assurance evidence has real value, but it does not remove the need for access reviews, rotation, revocation, and incident response. For teams evaluating NHI and IAM products, a certification should be treated as one input into trust, alongside operational evidence and control testing from sources such as NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls and NHIMG guidance on the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.

In practice, many security teams discover the gap between certification and reality only after a privileged account, token, or API key has already been overexposed.

How It Works in Practice

The most effective way to use certifications is to map them to procurement, due diligence, and control validation, not to treat them as a blanket approval. Common Criteria can indicate that a product has been evaluated against a defined security target, while ENS Alto can show that the vendor has met a higher Spanish public-sector assurance baseline. That is helpful, but the real question is whether the product supports your IAM operating model across provisioning, privilege management, logging, offboarding, and supplier governance.

A practical review should ask whether the certification scope covers the exact module, version, or deployment model being purchased. Teams should also verify whether the certified configuration matches the production configuration, because assurance often applies to a bounded build rather than to every customer deployment. For IAM and NHI platforms, that means checking:

• Whether access decisions can be tied to policy and role definitions that you control
• Whether privileged actions are logged in a way that supports investigation and retention requirements
• Whether secrets, tokens, and certificates can be rotated and revoked quickly
• Whether integrations with directories, vaults, and CI/CD systems are governed end to end
• Whether the vendor’s own supply chain, subcontractors, and support processes are covered by the assurance claim

For operational validation, current guidance suggests pairing certification review with evidence from control frameworks such as NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and continuous monitoring of the kinds of failures documented in NHIMG research, including the 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report. These controls tend to break down when teams assume the certificate covers live tenant settings, because production drift is where most IAM assurance fails.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter certification requirements often increase procurement time and review overhead, so organisations need to balance assurance value against delivery speed and regulatory scope. That tradeoff is especially important when a product is used across multiple jurisdictions or when an IAM platform is embedded in critical workflows.

There is no universal standard for how much weight Common Criteria or ENS Alto should carry in vendor selection. Best practice is evolving, but current guidance suggests using certification as a baseline filter, then layering risk-based checks for the actual deployment. For example, a certified identity component may still be unsuitable if it cannot support your logging retention, segregation of duties, or emergency access process. Likewise, a vendor certificate does not eliminate the need to test whether admin roles, service accounts, and API credentials are truly constrained in production.

NHIMG research on Sisense breach and TruffleNet BEC Attack shows how quickly trust can be undermined when credentials, integrations, or third-party access are not governed beyond the certificate. In practice, certification is most useful when it narrows the review surface, but it fails as a decision shortcut in complex hybrid environments with heavy customisation or outsourced administration.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

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