Teams often treat them as infrastructure details rather than governed identities with lifecycles, owners, and scoped permissions. That mistake leaves certificates and service credentials outside normal IAM controls, which increases the chance of stale access, hidden trust relationships, and unreviewed privilege across systems.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Machine and server identities are not just plumbing. They are decision-bearing identities that authenticate to cloud APIs, internal services, CI/CD systems, and data stores, often with broader reach than human users. When teams leave them out of identity governance, they miss the fact that a single service account, certificate, or API key can become a durable trust anchor across dozens of workloads.
That is why the risk is rarely visible until an incident forces a review. NHIMG notes that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, while 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, which helps explain why these identities become a blind spot rather than a controlled asset. The control problem is not abstract: it is present in exposed secrets, forgotten certificates, and unmanaged offboarding. NIST guidance on access control and identity lifecycle management reinforces that these are governance issues, not implementation details, as reflected in NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls and NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
In practice, many security teams discover the blast radius of machine identity sprawl only after a leaked token, expired certificate outage, or lateral movement event has already happened, rather than through intentional governance.
How It Works in Practice
The practical mistake is treating machine identities as static configuration instead of managed identities with owners, scope, and expiration. A better model starts by inventorying every service account, workload certificate, API key, and automation token, then mapping each to a business or technical owner. From there, teams should define what the identity is allowed to do, where it may authenticate, and how it is revoked when the workload changes or is decommissioned.
That lifecycle approach matters because credentials rarely stay inside the system that created them. NHIMG’s research shows that 96% of organisations store secrets outside secrets managers in vulnerable locations, and incidents such as JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure and Hard-Coded Secrets in VSCode Extensions show how quickly machine credential can escape intended boundaries. In parallel, organisations should prefer short-lived credentials and automated rotation, because long-lived secrets create a larger window for theft and reuse.
- Assign an owner to every machine identity and require a documented purpose.
- Use least privilege and separate identities by environment, application, and function.
- Prefer certificate or token issuance with short TTLs over static shared secrets.
- Review trust paths between services, pipelines, and third-party integrations.
- Revoke credentials automatically when workloads are retired or reshaped.
Zero Trust principles apply here too: identity verification must happen at each request, not only at provisioning time. Where organisations mature, they pair IAM with secrets management, certificate lifecycle automation, and logging that ties machine actions back to a named workload and owner, which aligns with the intent of CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model and NIST identity controls. These controls tend to break down when legacy systems depend on shared service accounts that cannot be individually issued, rotated, or audited.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter machine identity controls often increase operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance stronger governance against deployment speed and legacy compatibility. That tradeoff is real, especially in older platforms that were never designed for per-workload identities or automated secret rotation.
There is no universal standard for every environment yet, but current guidance suggests starting with the identities that have the broadest reach: CI/CD runners, orchestration platforms, production service accounts, and third-party integrations. Those are often the first places where hidden trust accumulates. In cloud-native systems, workload identity can reduce the need for embedded secrets, while in hybrid or mainframe-adjacent environments, teams may need compensating controls such as vaulting, rotation windows, and tighter network segmentation.
Edge cases also include shared vendors, break-glass automation, and certificate-based trust between internal services. Those should not be exempt from governance just because they are “technical.” NHIMG’s Code Formatting Tools Credential Leaks research illustrates how non-obvious software paths can expose secrets outside normal review. Best practice is evolving, but the direction is consistent: treat every machine identity as a governed asset with scope, lifecycle, and auditability.
In organisations with high automation and frequent ephemeral workloads, the hardest problem is usually not issuing credentials, but proving who owns them and when they should disappear.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0, NIST SP 800-63, NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 | Machine identities need inventory, ownership, and lifecycle control. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-1 | Covers authenticated access management for machine identities. |
| NIST SP 800-63 | Digital identity guidance informs credential assurance and lifecycle. | |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | ID | Zero Trust requires continuous identity verification for workloads. |
| NIST AI RMF | GOVERN | Governance is needed for autonomous identity sprawl and accountability. |
Enforce unique identity, least privilege, and authenticated access for each workload.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on July 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
