Non-Human Identity Security: Critical Risk Brief

Executive Summary

The NHI Crisis: Estimates show that Non-Human Identities (NHIs) outnumber human users anywhere from 45:1 to 100:1 in cloud environments, creating a massive, largely unmanaged attack surface. With generative AI adoption accelerating, this ratio is exploding exponentially. 

The Business Impact: NHI-related breaches are now among the most common entry points for attackers, directly threatening business continuity, regulatory compliance, and cloud cost optimization.

The Urgency: Unlike human identities with established governance, NHIs operate without MFA protection, lifecycle management, or centralized oversight, making them high-value, low-resistance targets for sophisticated threat actors seeking rapid network access to move laterally and breach.

• 80% of breaches involve compromised identities
• 95% of cloud identities are over-privileged

Call to Action:

Adopt a unified approach to human and non-human Identity Security that delivers full visibility, reduces privileges, and embeds intelligent automation to stop a compromised credential from leading to a breach, reduce risk exposure, and maintain operational agility.

Overview of the NHI Landscape

Non-Human Identity definition

• API keys, access keys (OAuth), certificates, tokens
• Service accounts and workload identities
• AI agents 

Key Characteristics and Risks of NHI

• Dynamic and Ephemeral: NHIs are rapidly created during cloud adoption, DevOps, or AI/automation processes, often without centralized visibility.
• Entitlements & Privileges: NHIs carry permissions (entitlements) that define what actions they can perform; with 95% of cloud identities deemed over-privileged, if compromised, these determine the “blast radius” of an attack.
• Credential-Based Authentication (no MFA): They authenticate using secrets (API keys, certificates, access keys) rather than MFA or passwordless methods available to humans.
• No tie to Human Lifecycles: Many NHIs are created or managed by developers, employees, or vendors; when humans leave or processes cease, associated NHIs often remain orphaned.
• No Single Authoritative Source: Unlike human identities (anchored in HR systems), NHIs lack a central system of record, making discovery and governance difficult.

Every NHI creates risk across three critical dimensions

1. Credentials (authentication secrets) - often long-lived and unrotated
2. Entitlements (permissions) - frequently over-privileged, your final line of defense
3. Client Security (applications/workloads using the NHI) - varies by ownership model

Impact to Business

• Security: Expanded attack surface; NHI compromise enables lateral movement.
  

• Compliance: Inadequate control of service accounts violates SOX, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, FSMA.
  

• Cost: Orphaned licenses and unused entitlements inflate cloud/SaaS spend.

Considerations and Recomendations

The true risk is not just credential theft, but the scope of entitlements those identities hold—over-privileged NHIs dramatically expand the blast radius of compromise.

To effectively reduce NHI risk, organizations must move beyond point solutions that only manage credential rotation. The critical focus should be on entitlements, permissions, and governance—the dimensions that directly define exposure.

Key Recommendations

1. Comprehensive Discovery: Build a complete inventory of all NHIs, their credentials, entitlements, and workloads.
   
2. Entitlement Right-Sizing: Continuously analyze usage data to identify and remove unused or excessive permissions, shifting rarely used privileges to Just-in-Time elevation.
   
3. Human Ownership: Establish clear ownership and lifecycle ties between NHIs and their human sponsors, ensuring decommissioning when employees or vendors leave.
   
4. Dynamic Least Privilege: Enforce least privilege not just for human identities, but also for NHIs by reducing standing entitlements to only low-risk, frequently used permissions.
   
5. Automated Monitoring & Remediation: Use behavioral analytics to detect anomalous NHI activity and automate remediation actions such as key rotation, entitlement removal, and session summarization.

Conclusion & Ask

To materially reduce NHI risk, the organization must:

• Invest in unified tooling that provides context, not just credential rotation.
  

• Assign ownership and accountability for NHI lifecycle management.
  

• Secure executive sponsorship to drive cross-team alignment (Security, Cloud, DevOps).

The Window is Closing: As AI adoption accelerates and threat actors increasingly target NHIs, organizations that act now gain significant competitive advantage in security posture and operational efficiency.