Non-Human Identity Management: Addressing the Gaping Hole in the Identity Perimeter

Non-Human Identities (NHIs) such as service accounts, tokens, access keys, and API keys, are critical components of modern business operations across all sectors and industries. Take the financial services industry: NHIs play a fundamental role in technologies like blockchain and open banking, managing secure access and data integrity across increasingly decentralized environments. As organizations adopt more cloud services and automation, the number of NHIs grows exponentially. In an average enterprise environment, today, NHIs outnumber human identities by a factor of 10x-50x.

However, NHI management is often neglected, leaving misconfigurations, unrotated secrets, and overprivileged access vulnerabilities exposed to unauthorized access, data exfiltration, and ultimately, costly cyberattacks.

NHIs are the access points to enterprise data and applications, making them attractive targets for cybercriminals. NHIs frequently possess elevated privileges to carry out their tasks, which heightens the risk if their credentials are compromised. In fact, on average, we find that there are five times more highly privileged NHIs than humans.

Adding to this issue, traditional Privileged Access Management (PAM), and Identity & Access Management (IAM) solutions and best practices cannot address the scale, ephemerality, and distributed nature of NHIs. Unlike human users, NHIs cannot be protected with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), which makes it harder to limit the impact of breaches. While password rotation for human accounts is a mature and efficient process, the same cannot be said for secrets and keys due to the lack of visibility of usage and ownership context. While solutions like secret scanners can help spot vulnerabilities such as hard-coded or shared secrets, the operational complexity of performing operations like rotations or decommissioning is often insurmountable.

With traditional identity best practices rendered obsolete and NHIs proliferating every day, the industry needs solutions to properly secure this massive attack surface. The recent Dropbox, Okta, Slack, and Microsoft cyberattacks, which involved the exploitation of NHIs, spotlight the costly effects of improper NHI management.

Against this backdrop, organizations must incorporate comprehensive NHI management into their security and identity programs. Key best practices for managing NHIs include:

Maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date inventory of all NHIs within the organization
Understand the business context and owners of each NHI
Apply the principle of least privilege
Monitor the environment continuously to detect and respond to suspicious activities involving NHIs
Define governance policies and implement them via automation

Secret rotation is a key NHI governance process to prioritize. All too often, NHIs leverage secrets that are infrequently rotated. Rotating secrets reduces the risk of credential compromise by minimizing the window of opportunity for attackers and mitigating exposure to insider threats. Rotating secrets should become an integral part of organizations’ mover/leaver processes to safely offboard employees.

Adopting an enterprise platform purpose-built to secure the complete lifecycle of NHIs is a simple and effective way to avoid cyber incidents stemming from the unique challenges of managing and securing NHIs. Investing in these tools is necessary to protect against evolving threats and uphold security in a dynamic digital landscape.

Implementing an NHI management platform can empower organizations with:

Complete visibility, providing a holistic view of all NHIs, and understanding their usage; dependencies; and relationships within an IT stack.
Proactive security posture management, continuously assessing and improving the security posture of NHIs, and taking proactive measures to mitigate risks.
Automated governance, automating the entire lifecycle of NHIs from discovery to decommissioning, ensuring robust security and operational efficiency.
Seamless integration, integrating with an existing security stack, providing a unified approach to identity management.

Until recently, identity security was synonymous with governance and access management for human identities. This is no longer the case as NHIs have massively expanded the enterprise perimeter. Notable high-profile cyber incidents have underscored how compromised NHIs can lead to significant security breaches, highlighting why a robust NHI management framework is a strategic imperative for sustaining business operations in our interconnected world. Modern NHI management solutions are pivotal in addressing these challenges and helping organizations prevent potentially devastating cyberattacks.