Oasis Security – The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10: A Strategic Imperative for 2025
Non-human identities (NHIs), such as service accounts, API keys, and IAM roles, have become fundamental to modern enterprise environments, enabling machine-to-machine access and authentication. However, as organizations embrace cloud-native architectures, microservices, third-party integrations, and, more recently, AI, the proliferation of NHIs has outpaced security controls, significantly expanding the attack surface that adversaries actively exploit.
Despite their importance, NHIs often lack the same level of governance, visibility, and protection as human identities. Mismanagement, overprivileged access, long-lived secrets, and improper offboarding have made them prime targets for breaches, ransomware attacks, and supply chain compromises.
To address this growing risk, the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) Non-Human Identity Top 10 provides a structured framework for organizations to identify, prioritize, and mitigate the most pressing security risks associated with NHIs. As we approach 2025, securing NHIs is no longer optional but a strategic imperative. This guide serves as a roadmap for security professionals, helping them implement proactive security measures to reduce risk and protect enterprise systems from evolving threats.
Understanding OWASP NHI Top 10
The OWASP NHI Top 10 is a curated list of the most prevalent and impactful security threats affecting non-human identities in modern applications. Cybercriminals increasingly target these identities due to their privileged access and lack of human oversight.
Built on extensive research, real-world threat intelligence, and attack data, this list serves as a critical reference for security leaders, developers, and IAM teams working to secure machine-to-machine access and authentication across hybrid environments.
Key Takeaways for Organizations
1. Enhanced Awareness: Educating teams on the risks of non-human identities fosters a proactive security culture.
2. Risk-Based Prioritization: Allocating resources effectively by first addressing the most critical threats improves defences.
3. Regulatory Compliance: Aligning with OWASP recommendations helps meet industry standards and legal requirements.
4. Proactive Defence Strategies: Implementing robust identity governance, access controls, and continuous monitoring reduces the risk of exploitation.
The OWASP NHI Top 10 Security Risks
The OWASP NHI Top 10 identifies the most critical security risks related to non-human identities. These include:
● NHI1:2025 – Improper Offboarding: NHIs not properly deactivated or removed remain active beyond their intended use, creating persistent security gaps. Attackers exploit these to compromise critical systems, exfiltrate data, and maintain long-term persistence.
● NHI2:2025 – Secret Leakage: When secrets containing high-impact credentials are leaked, they significantly increase the risk of a severe breach.
● NHI3:2025 – Vulnerable Third-Party NHI: Third-party applications that access sensitive data can be compromised, leading to supply chain attacks, data theft, and critical system failures.
● NHI4:2025 – Insecure Authentication: Insecure protocols used for sensitive, high-access processes can lead to account takeover or privilege escalation.
● NHI5:2025 – Overprivileged NHI: Due to their extensive range of associated privileges, overprivileged non-human identities can have a significant negative impact.
● NHI6:2025 – Insecure Cloud Deployment Configurations: CI/CD misconfigurations enable supply chain attacks and unauthorized access due to high pipeline privileges.
● NHI7:2025 – Long-Lived Secrets: Long-lived secrets are common due to rotation challenges and the lack of ephemeral solutions. Most secret managers track rotation time, making detection easy.
● NHI8:2025 – Environment Isolation: NHIs are often used during deployment and throughout an application’s lifecycle. However, reusing the same NHIs across multiple environments, especially between testing and production, can introduce significant security vulnerabilities.
● NHI9:2025 – NHI Reuse: NHIs are very commonly reused because tailor-fitting NHI for each workload is difficult.
● NHI10:2025 – Human Use of NHI: Most NHI providers do not provide tooling to differentiate between workloads assuming the NHI and humans assuming the NHI.
Solving the problem of NHIs
As organizations scale their digital ecosystems, they must gain comprehensive visibility into these NHIs across their infrastructure. Robust security measures are essential to protect sensitive data and systems, prevent unauthorized access, and minimize misuse. Additionally, governance capabilities ensure compliance with industry regulations and internal policies, helping safeguard digital assets while minimizing the risk of data breaches.
Automating Identity Discovery and Context
One of the biggest challenges organizations face is identifying, mapping, and contextualizing NHIs across their infrastructure. Businesses need a solution that continuously scans and correlates NHIs, including service accounts on-prem, IAM roles in AWS, and service principles in Azure. By reconstructing identity context, businesses gain actionable intelligence on ownership, usage patterns, and risk exposure.
Advanced Threat Detection and Response
Organizations should deploy AI-driven analytics and behavioural monitoring to detect anomalies in NHI activity. By continuously analysing machine identity behaviours, you can flag unusual patterns that may indicate compromised credentials, insider threats, or privilege abuse. With real-time alerts and automated response actions, organizations can contain incidents before they escalate.
Enforcing Least Privilege Access
A solution should enforce policy-driven, least-privilege access for NHIs through dynamic access controls and just-in-time privilege escalation. This ensures that non-human identities only have the minimum permissions required for their function, reducing the risk of malicious actors exploiting overprivileged NHIs.
Policy-Driven Governance
By automating security policies and compliance frameworks, you can ensure that only authorized NHIs have access to critical resources. This minimizes the risk of privilege escalation, credential misuse, and compliance violations, allowing organizations to enforce security at scale without relying on manual intervention.
Conclusion
Oasis Security is at the forefront of solving the challenges associated with non-human identities. It provides a purpose-built platform that automates the discovery, security, and governance of NHIs across enterprise environments. Unlike legacy identity solutions that struggle with NHI governance, Oasis Security provides continuous discovery, contextual understanding, and dynamic privilege enforcement, ensuring real-time protection.
