Advancements in AI, IoT, cloud services, and microservices architecture have fundamentally altered how we approach identity management and necessitated the creation and management of service accounts, APIs, and application accounts. That’s where non-human identities (NHIs) come in.
While NHIs enhance automation, scalability, and efficiency, they also introduce new security challenges that must be addressed to protect applications and data.
This article explores what NHIs are and the benefits of a robust non-human identity management (NHIM) strategy. We’ll also delve into best practices and highlight how Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) can play a pivotal role in securing them.
Key takeaways:
- Non-human identities are digital entities like service accounts, APIs, bots, and IoT devices that interact with systems and data without human involvement.
- NHIs often outnumber human identities and pose major risks when secrets are exposed, permissions are overly broad, or identity sprawl goes unmanaged.
- Effective NHIM strategies include enforcing least privilege, automating credential rotation, conducting risk-based access reviews, and aligning with frameworks like NIST.
- Key capabilities to look for in NHIM tools include NHI inventory, classification, secrets correlation, posture management, and integrations that support governance and incident response.
What Are Non-Human Identities?
Non-human identities are digital entities that interact with systems and data, including service accounts, APIs, IoT devices, and bots. Unlike human users, these identities are created for applications, processes, and devices to perform specific tasks autonomously.
Just like employee passwords act as unique identifiers for humans and give them controlled access to relevant systems, these identities ensure that devices and applications interact seamlessly and securely, allowing only the right machines and programs to connect with each other.
Non-human entities have unique characteristics, including:
- Machine-Readable Authentication: Typically use API keys, tokens, and certificates for authentication, designed for automated processes.
- Automated Lifecycle Management: Managed through dynamic and automated processes, including provisioning, rotation, and de-provisioning of credentials.
- Specific Technical Roles: Created for specific technical functions such as running scripts, accessing APIs, and managing cloud resources.
- Continuous Operation: NHIs operate 24/7 without the need for rest, performing tasks and processes continuously.
- High Precision in Repetitive Tasks: They execute repetitive tasks with high precision and consistency, reducing the risk of errors.
- Rapid Scalability: Can be scaled up or down rapidly to meet application and service demands, often automatically.
Non-Human Identity Examples
Non-human identities encompass a wide range of entities, each playing a crucial role in modern IT environments. They are most prevalent in cloud services, software development, and IoT ecosystems, where automation and scalability are essential. Here are just a few examples:
APIs and Microservices
APIs are essential identities that enable communication between different software components. In a microservices architecture, APIs facilitate the interaction between services, making them a vital part of the application ecosystem. Securing APIs involves strong authentication and authorization mechanisms to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches.
Application Accounts
Application accounts are used by software applications to interact with databases, operating systems, and other applications. These accounts often have elevated privileges, which is one reason why developers have become even higher-value targets for compromise.
Service Accounts
Service accounts are used in cloud environments to manage access to resources. For example, AWS IAM roles, Azure Managed Identities, and Google Cloud Service Accounts are designed to provide secure access to services and data. Proper management of these accounts includes setting stringent access controls and regularly auditing permissions.
The sheer number and dispersed nature of NHIs, which often outnumber human identities by a ratio of 45 to 1, create significant vulnerabilities. NHIs with excessive permissions, if unmanaged, can be easily exploited by malicious actors, leading to data breaches and other incidents.
Verizon’s latest DBIR report indicates that compromised secrets and stolen credentials remain the number one way that attackers gain access to systems. That’s why non-human identity management is so important.
What Is NHIM?
NHIM is the practice of managing and securing identities that are not tied to individual users. Its purpose is to ensure that identities are properly authenticated, authorized, and audited, maintaining the integrity of the systems and data they interact with. Effective secrets management is integral to NHIM, and both are essential components of a good application security strategy.
Other key components include:
- Identity Provisioning: Automating the creation and deployment of identities based on predefined policies.
- Authentication: Ensuring that non-human entities prove their identity through secure methods such as API keys, tokens, and certificates.
- Authorization: Granting appropriate access levels to identities based on the principle of least privilege.
- Lifecycle Management: Managing the entire lifecycle of NHIs, including provisioning, rotation, and de-provisioning.
Managing NHIs vs. Managing Human Identities
To implement an effective identity management strategy, it’s essential you understand the differences between managing human and non-human identities. We can summarize these differences in three broad categories.
Authentication and Authorization
Authentication for non-human identities typically involves API keys and tokens, while human identities use passwords and biometrics. Non-human identities require more granular authorization controls to ensure that each identity only has access to the necessary resources.
Lifecycle Management
Lifecycle management for non-human identities demands automation due to their large numbers and dynamic nature. Automated provisioning and de-provisioning based on workload requirements are essential to maintaining security and efficiency.
Security and Compliance
NHIM faces unique security challenges, such as preventing token theft and ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. ASPM tools can help maintain a strong posture by continuously monitoring and managing these identities.
Learn more about achieving compliance in the SDLC.
Why Is Non-Human Identity Management Important?
Non-human identity management is critical to preventing unauthorized access and potential data breaches.
Just look at Capital One’s data breach. A misconfigured service account in the cloud environment allowed a hacker to access sensitive customer data, including Social Security numbers and bank account details. The breach affected over 100 million customers, leading to significant financial and reputational damage for Capital One, as well as regulatory fines and lawsuits.
How NHIM Benefits Your Organization
Now that we’ve seen the consequences of poor NHIM let’s look at the benefits of an effective NHIM.
Enhanced Security
A well-managed non-human identity security strategy significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and malware spread. By securing these identities, organizations can protect sensitive data, including source code, and maintain strong postures. For instance, poorly managed service accounts or leaked API keys can lead to source code leaks, as seen in high-profile breaches.
Improved Operational Efficiency
Effective NHIM enhances operational efficiency by automating the management of identities, reducing the need for manual intervention. This streamlining of processes enables scalability and ensures smooth and secure application deployment, particularly in DevOps and CI/CD practices.
Regulatory Compliance
NHIM is essential for meeting regulatory requirements and industry standards. Proper management facilitates audits and ensures ongoing compliance, helping organizations avoid penalties and reputational damage while maintaining trust with customers and stakeholders.
Best Practices for Managing Non-Human Entities
Security teams and developers face significant challenges when it comes to creating and executing effective NHIM strategies. For example:
Managing a Large Number of NHIs
With non-human identities often outnumbering human ones, managing them manually can lead to overlooked identities, creating significant vulnerabilities. Without automation and centralized oversight, these identities can easily be exploited by attackers.
Achieving Visibility into Non-Human Identity Activities
Identities frequently operate in the background, making their activities difficult to monitor. Without continuous visibility into their interactions, teams may miss signs of unauthorized access or malicious activity.
Ensuring Robust Authentication and Authorization
NHIs require strong authentication, such as API keys or certificates, but managing these mechanisms across many identities can lead to AppSec Chaos.
Continuous Monitoring and Auditing for Anomalies
The high volume of non-human entities makes it difficult to monitor for unusual behavior. Without continuous auditing, anomalous activities, such as suspicious access attempts, can go unnoticed. The result? Increased risk of long-term exposure.
Balancing Security with Functionality
Maintaining non-human identity security without disrupting workflows is challenging. Overly restrictive controls can impede operations, while insufficient protocols opens the door to exploitation. This forces teams to navigate the tension between security and productivity, something the majority of teams struggle with.
Ensuring Appropriate Permissions Without Over-Privileging
Determining and enforcing the right level of access for non-human identities is complex. Granting excessive permissions creates security risks, as compromised identities can access sensitive systems far beyond their intended scope.
Maintaining and Updating Non-Human Identities as Applications Evolve
As applications evolve, non-human identities must be maintained and updated to remain secure. Stale or orphaned identities are often overlooked, presenting an easy target for attackers seeking to exploit outdated credentials.
Keeping Up with Evolving Security Threats
The threat landscape for non-human identities evolves quickly, with new vulnerabilities emerging regularly. Falling behind on security updates or failing to adapt identity management strategies can result in major breaches.
Prioritizing Identity Management Tasks
With so many non-human identities, prioritizing critical tasks like credential rotation and audits can be overwhelming. Neglecting these tasks, even for short periods, increases the risk of compromised credentials and security incidents.
To help you overcome these challenges, we recommend considering the following best practice tips.
Principle of Least Privilege
Granting the minimum necessary permissions to NHIs is paramount. In cloud environments, this can be implemented by creating finely tuned policies that restrict access based on specific roles and functions.
Automated Lifecycle Management
Automation in provisioning, rotating, and de-provisioning credentials is crucial. Various solutions (including Identity as a Service (IDaaS) tools, cloud access management tools, secrets management tools, DevOps tools, and ASPM) facilitate automated alerting and remediation, ensuring that identities are managed efficiently and securely.
Regular Auditing and Monitoring
Continuous monitoring and regular audits are necessary to detect anomalies and ensure compliance. Regular auditing helps maintain visibility into the activities of every non-human identity and ensures that any potential security issues are identified and addressed promptly.
Use a Complete ASPM Platform
Utilizing a complete Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform can significantly enhance NHIM. A complete ASPM platform provides unparalleled visibility into the posture of NHIs, enabling proactive risk prioritization, threat mitigation, remediation and ensuring compliance with policies.
Importantly, complete ASPM platforms do more than just manage NHIs. They unify various security tools and data sources into a single interface, improving security posture from code to cloud.
Incorporating Non-Human Identity Security into Your Organization
Now that you understand the importance of non-human identity management, the next step is putting it into practice. Here are five steps you can take to begin or improve your NHIM strategy, reduce risk exposure, and improve operational efficiency.
Centralize Identity Lifecycle Management
Managing the lifecycle of non-human identities across fragmented systems leads to gaps, blind spots, and orphaned accounts. Centralizing this process—ideally through a unified platform—gives teams full visibility into the creation, use, rotation, and de-provisioning of NHIs. This not only improves efficiency but also prevents security drift as environments scale.
Automate Token and Certificate Rotation
Manual rotation of secrets like API tokens and certificates is error-prone and unsustainable at scale. Automating rotation reduces the window of exposure for compromised credentials and ensures that security isn’t dependent on human oversight. Use tools that support frequent, policy-driven rotation and integrate with CI/CD pipelines to maintain secure development workflows.
Align with Industry Security Frameworks
NHIM should not exist in a vacuum. Align your identity management practices with established frameworks such as NIST. Doing so helps ensure you meet compliance requirements, avoid audit findings, and adopt industry-validated controls to manage risk consistently across your organization.
Implement Risk-Based Access Reviews
Not all non-human identities carry equal risk. That’s why it’s important to conduct regular access reviews, especially for identities with elevated or persistent permissions. Evaluate whether access is still required, determine if it violates least privilege, and flag identities that represent excessive risk. This enables more precise remediation and stronger posture.
Use Just-in-Time Access for NHIs
Temporary access mechanisms—like Just-in-Time (JIT) provisioning—limit the duration and scope of non-human access to sensitive systems. Rather than leaving credentials always active, JIT enables short-lived access only when needed, reducing the attack surface. Combine this with auditing and expiration policies to enforce tighter control across the SDLC.
Top Features a Solution for Managing Non-Human Entities Should Offer
Managing non-human identities requires a specialized set of features that cater to their unique characteristics. Here are some key features to look for when selecting a non-human identity management solution:
1. NHI Inventory
The foundation of any NHIM strategy is visibility. Organizations need a complete, continuously updated inventory of all non-human identities across their development and production environments. This includes service accounts, automation tokens, API keys, and more — wherever they live.
Cycode’s ASPM platform provides code-to-cloud visibility that helps teams surface NHIs across repositories, pipelines, and infrastructure.
2. NHI Classification
Not all NHIs are created equal. Classifying them by type, privilege level, purpose, or exposure is essential to understanding which ones pose the greatest risk. This enables more effective access controls, monitoring, and remediation planning.
Cycode enriches identity data with contextual signals from CI/CD pipelines, IaC configurations, and source control — and leverages its Risk Intelligence Graph (RIG) to map relationships and prioritize NHI risks based on real exposure, not just surface-level metadata.
3. Secrets Detection and Correlation
Since NHIs depend on secrets like API keys and tokens, identifying exposed or mismanaged secrets is a top priority. Even more important is correlating those secrets to the identities they belong to, so you can assess the true impact of a leak.
Cycode scans for secrets across code, configs, and collaboration tools, and ties them back to the NHIs they support — making it easier to understand blast radius and triage incidents.
4. NHI Governance and Posture Management
Effective governance requires prioritizing the riskiest NHIs and enforcing guardrails. This includes identifying over-permissioned identities, unused accounts, and misconfigurations that could be exploited. While some platforms offer enforcement, others focus on insight and alerting.
Cycode helps teams assess NHI posture and automate risk-driven workflows — like generating tickets for remediation or pushing alerts to the right stakeholders.
5. NHI Lifecycle Management
NHI lifecycle management — including creation, rotation, and decommissioning — is often fragmented across tools. Even if your platform doesn’t own this process end-to-end, it should facilitate decisions by surfacing stale or risky identities and integrating with enforcement tools.
While Cycode doesn’t manage lifecycles directly, it supports this work by highlighting orphaned identities and integrating with identity platforms for action.
6. NHI Detection and Response
Detecting misuse of NHIs in real time is typically handled by runtime tools, SIEMs, or SOARs. But to respond effectively, these tools need context — like which identity was involved, what it was connected to, and how sensitive its access was.
Cycode plays a supporting role here by providing enriched telemetry that can be shared with detection and response systems via integrations.
Selecting the Right Non-Human Identity Tool for Your Team
Now that you know what features matter most in a non-human identity management solution, the next step is figuring out which tool aligns best with your environment, workflows, and risk profile. While many tools offer similar core capabilities on paper, key differences in integration depth, scalability, usability, and real-world impact can make or break success.
Here’s how to evaluate your options with those nuances in mind.
Ecosystem Compatibility
Your NHIM solution must integrate smoothly into your existing stack—cloud providers, version control systems, CI/CD tools, and secrets managers. Look for broad, out-of-the-box integration capabilities and support for both legacy and modern systems. Cycode’s ASPM platform, for instance, is built with integration in mind, supporting a wide range of tools across the SDLC.
Scalability and Performance
As the number of non-human identities grows, performance can suffer—especially during peak periods of code deployment or infrastructure scaling. Ensure the solution is designed to handle high volumes of identity activity and offers intelligent prioritization. As we’ve mentioned, Cycode’s RIG helps maintain high performance while flagging the highest-risk identities first.
Developer Experience
A solution is only effective if the people using it can work with it easily. Prioritize tools that offer clean UIs, native integrations into developer workflows (like Git or PRs), and automation to reduce manual toil. Cycode was designed with developers in mind, offering inline remediation and visibility directly within their toolchains.
Risk Reduction Capabilities
The right solution should go beyond visibility to offer real, actionable risk reduction. Features like automated secret rotation, anomaly detection, and proactive remediation help move teams from reactive to preventative. Cycode delivers this through its layered approach to AppSec and contextual risk scoring, helping you focus on what matters most.
Streamline Your Identity Management Strategies with Cycode
Cycode offers a complete ASPM platform that delivers a comprehensive suite of security capabilities, including:
Unlike standalone ASPM platforms, Cycode offers proprietary scanners and allows companies to integrate their third-party security tools, providing a holistic view of risks associated with NHIM.
And remember, the platform’s Risk Intelligence Graph (RIG) enhances visibility, prioritization, and remediation of critical vulnerabilities. Once vulnerabilities are identified, Cycode’s developer workflows empower teams to quickly and easily address critical vulnerabilities within their own environments without the need to log into the Cycode platform.
This seamless integration and the complete approach to ASPM make Cycode an essential platform for managing the secrets associated with non-human identities (and other vulnerabilities) across the entire SDLC.
Book a demo now to learn more about how Cycode can enhance your non-human identity management process.
