Because remote administration, API calls, and update delivery all depend on trusted identities, even when the subject is a device rather than a person. If those identities are unmanaged, shared, or hard to revoke, the product’s security boundary becomes unreliable. In practice, NHI governance must cover service accounts, API credentials, and maintenance pathways.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Connected products do not just expand the attack surface, they also expand the number of identities that can act on behalf of the product, its operators, and its supply chain. Remote support channels, telemetry APIs, firmware signing, update orchestration, and partner integrations all rely on credentials or tokens that must be governed like any other privileged access path. That is why access control becomes an identity governance issue rather than a narrow device configuration problem.
The practical risk is not limited to unauthorised login. Shared service accounts, long-lived API keys, stale maintenance access, and weak revocation processes can let a legitimate pathway become a persistent backdoor. Current guidance suggests aligning these pathways to the same governance discipline used for privileged users, with ownership, approval, review, and expiry built in. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is useful here because it frames identity, access, and resilience as operational outcomes rather than isolated controls.
In practice, many security teams encounter this only after a support credential, update token, or partner integration has already been abused rather than through intentional identity governance.
How It Works in Practice
In connected environments, governance starts with inventory. Security teams need to know which identities exist, what they can reach, who owns them, how they authenticate, and how quickly they can be revoked. That includes machine identities used by devices, gateways, cloud services, mobile apps, and update services. The challenge is that these identities often sit outside classic joiner-mover-leaver processes, so they drift into shadow ownership or remain active long after the original use case has ended.
A workable approach usually combines privileged access discipline, secrets management, and lifecycle controls. The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is a helpful reference for failure modes such as hard-coded secrets, over-privileged service accounts, and weak rotation. In parallel, control families in NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls support access enforcement, auditability, and configuration management.
- Assign each device or service identity a named owner and business purpose.
- Use unique credentials per product, environment, and function instead of shared access.
- Set rotation, revocation, and certificate expiry as default controls, not exception handling.
- Review machine identities on the same cadence as privileged human access.
- Log authentication, key use, and administrative actions into central monitoring.
This becomes especially important for software update channels, remote diagnostics, and third-party support workflows because those paths are designed for convenience and are often granted broad reach. CIS Controls v8 is also relevant for asset inventory, access control, and audit logging. These controls tend to break down in highly distributed product fleets where offline devices, legacy protocols, and vendor-managed access prevent timely revocation.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter access control often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance fast support and safe updates against stronger approval, rotation, and review. That tradeoff is real in product engineering, field service, and embedded environments, where uptime and remote maintainability matter.
There is no universal standard for this yet in every product category, especially where devices must work offline, rely on constrained hardware, or support long-lived deployments in the field. In those cases, best practice is evolving toward segmented trust domains, scoped tokens, and certificate-based trust with short validity periods where possible. Where human operators and machine identities overlap, the identity boundary can blur, so governance should explicitly define when a person is acting through a device identity versus their own account.
For regulated environments, access pathways tied to payment data or sensitive operational systems may also need to map to PCI DSS v4.0 expectations for access restriction and monitoring. In broader enterprise settings, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Information Security Management helps frame ownership, review, and control assurance across the product lifecycle.
The hardest edge case is a device estate that mixes legacy support credentials, vendor-managed access, and cloud automation because identity ownership becomes fragmented and revocation is rarely coordinated end to end.
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 800-53 Rev 5 and CIS Controls v8 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA | Identity and access governance are central to connected product trust boundaries. |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | Connected products often rely on non-human identities with weak lifecycle controls. | |
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | AC-2 | Account management supports ownership, review, and revocation of product access paths. |
| CIS Controls v8 | 5 | Account and access management aligns with controlling non-human and support identities. |
Inventory, rotate, and revoke machine identities with the same rigor used for privileged users.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on July 14, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
