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The hidden explosion of non-human entities

Ever wonder why your security dashboard looks like a ghost town even when your cloud bill is screaming? It is because the real action isn't coming from your employees anymore—it's coming from the machines.

Honestly, we’ve hit a tipping point where humans are the minority in the digital world. For every one person you hire, you’re likely spawning dozens of service accounts, tokens, and api keys.

• The 20:1 reality: Recent research suggests that non-human identities (nhi) now outnumber human ones by as much as 20 to 1, as noted by CyberArk. Some environments even see ratios up to 45:1.
• Microservice sprawl: Every time a developer spins up a new pod in Kubernetes or a ci/cd pipeline, a new identity is born. These entities never sleep, never complain, and—scarily—never leave the company unless you manually kill them.
• The "always-on" risk: Unlike a human who logs off at 5 PM, a service account stays active 24/7. If a secret leaks, the attacker has a permanent, high-speed tunnel into your data.

Most of our security tools were built for people. We think about mfa, password resets, and sso. But how do you send a push notification to a build server? You can't.

• Static credential nightmares: We’re still seeing 23.8 million secrets leaked in public repositories as of a 2024 study by GitGuardian. That is a 25% jump from last year.
• Lack of oversight: In a finance setting, a simple data-syncing script might have "admin" rights because it was easier to set up that way. You end up with a massive security hole that legacy iam won't catch.

In healthcare, I’ve seen medical imaging devices use the same hardcoded credentials for a decade. If one device is popped, the whole network is wide open because nobody "owns" that machine identity.

So, how do we actually manage this mess? Next, we'll look at the lifecycle.

Understanding the NHI management framework

Ever tried to untangle a bowl of spaghetti while wearing oven mitts? That is basically what managing machine identities feels like if you don't have a solid framework. Honestly, most folks just toss credentials into a vault and call it a day, but that’s like locking your front door while leaving the windows wide open.

We gotta stop treating the nhi as just a "password problem" and start seeing the bigger picture. According to KuppingerCole, a real identity is a composite—a messy graph of interrelated parts.

• Identity vs. Account vs. Secret: Think of it like this. The Identity is the "who"—like your "Billing Service." That one identity might have multiple Accounts (an aws iam role for storage and a snowflake user for data). Each of those accounts has its own Secret (an oidc token or a password). If you only manage the secret, you lose track of what the identity is actually doing across different platforms.
• Ownership is everything: Every nhi needs a human "parent." If a service account in a finance app starts acting weird at 3 AM, you need to know exactly which dev team to wake up. Without ownership, identities become "ghosts" that never get deleted.
• Standing Access: This is a big one. Standing access refers to permissions that are always "on," even when the machine isn't doing anything. It's the opposite of "just-in-time" access. If a bot has 24/7 admin rights but only runs once a week, that’s a massive window for an attacker to exploit.

It’s almost funny—if it wasn't so dangerous—but 100% of orgs find overprivileged accounts during reviews. I've seen it in retail where a simple inventory bot had full admin rights just because the setup script was easier that way. If that bot gets hijacked, the hacker can delete the whole product catalog.

In a modern ci/cd setup, you shouldn't have a static api key sitting in a file. Instead, use identity federation. For example, a github action can use an oidc token to assume a temporary role in aws. No static secret, no permanent risk.

The core pillars of entitlement management

Look, if you don't know what's running in your basement, you can't lock the doors. Managing entitlements for machine identities is basically impossible if you're still treating them like a side project for the devops team.

You can't govern what you can't see, right? I've seen so many "shadow" service accounts created by a developer three years ago for a "quick test" that are still sitting there with full admin rights. According to ConductorOne, these identities outnumber humans by at least 20:1, which makes a manual inventory a total joke.

You need automated tools that can crawl your cloud environments—aws, gcp, azure—and actually map these api keys to business functions. If an account has no human "parent" or owner, it’s a ghost. And ghosts are exactly what hackers love to use for lateral movement because nobody is watching the logs.

A common challenge is that nhi are created across various systems and teams, leading to a total lack of centralized visibility, as previously discussed in the nhi management framework section.

Stop giving every bot "admin" access just because the setup script was easier that way. It’s lazy and dangerous.

As Okta points out, you need to move toward short-lived credentials. instead of a static key that lives forever, use tokens that expire in an hour. This way, even if a secret leaks, the window of opportunity for the bad guys is tiny.

• Healthcare: A medical imaging device should only have "write" access to a specific s3 bucket, not the ability to browse the whole network.
• Finance: Use infrastructure-as-code (iac) to bake security policies directly into the deployment. If the code tries to spawn a pod with too much power, the build fails automatically.

Honestly, getting this right is about moving from static "set it and forget it" rules to dynamic, context-aware access.

Credential lifecycle and secrets automation

If you think a digital vault is the finish line for security, I’ve got some bad news. Storing a secret is just the beginning—governing how that secret actually lives, breathes, and eventually dies is where the real work happens.

As previously discussed, vaults are great for storage, but they don't solve the "standing access" problem. A static api key sitting in a vault for three years is still a huge risk if someone gets into that vault.

How to actually rotate secrets (The technical bit)

If you're using something like AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault, you shouldn't be doing this by hand. Here is the basic flow for a safe rotation:

1. Create a new version: The vault generates a new password or key.
2. Update the target: The vault logs into the database or service and changes the password to the new one.
3. Test the connection: The vault tries to login with the new creds to make sure it didn't break.
4. Propagate: Your apps pull the new secret. If you use Kubernetes External Secrets, the operator automatically syncs the change into your pods without a restart.
5. Retire the old one: After a "grace period," the old secret is deleted.

• The manual rotation trap: If you’re rotating keys manually, you're going to break production eventually. It's not a matter of if, but when someone forgets to update a config file.
• Short-lived over long-lived: The goal is moving toward tokens that expire in minutes, not months. This way, even if a token is snatched, it's useless by the time the hacker tries to use it.

This "just-in-time" (jit) approach shrinks your blast radius to almost nothing. In a retail environment, for example, a seasonal inventory bot should only have its credentials activated during peak hours. Once the job is done, the identity should basically vanish.

Modern threats and how to stop them

Ever feel like you’re playing a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole with your cloud credentials? Honestly, just when you think you've locked down every human user, a random token from a forgotten build script shows up and starts poking around your production database.

The scary reality is that attackers aren't just guessing passwords anymore. They’re going after the memory of your running apps to harvest oAuth tokens or api keys. This "runtime memory extraction" is a favorite for sophisticated actors because it bypasses traditional static vaulting.

• Pipeline exposure: Your ci/cd tools are basically the keys to the kingdom. If a hacker poisons your build system, they don't just get access—they can inject malicious code that harvests credentials directly from your infrastructure-as-code files.
• Cross-environment leakage: I’ve seen dev teams use the same service account for staging and production just because it was "faster" to set up. That is a massive lateral movement gift to any attacker.

Measuring your NHI security (KPIs)

Before we look at the future, you gotta know if you're winning. Here are the metrics that actually matter:

• NHI-to-Human Ratio: If this is climbing but your security team size isn't, you're in trouble.
• Percentage of automated rotation: How many of your secrets are rotated by a machine vs. a human? (Aim for 90%+).
• Number of orphaned identities: How many "ghost" accounts with no owner are sitting in your cloud?
• Mean time to revoke: How fast can you kill a compromised token?

Anyway, catching these digital ghosts in real-time is the only way to stay ahead. Next, we’ll talk about how to future-proof this whole stack.

Future proofing your identity stack

So, we’ve built this massive digital engine, but are we actually ready for when the machines start making their own decisions? Honestly, looking at the way agentic ai is moving, the old "set it and forget it" vaulting strategy is basically a relic at this point.

We’re moving toward a world where ai agents don't just suggest code—they execute it. This means your nhi stack needs to handle actors that are way more unpredictable than a standard cron job.

• Dynamic Policy Enforcement: Since these agents move at machine speed, you need real-time observability to kill a session the second an agent drifts from its baseline behavior.
• Post-Quantum Readiness: We also gotta start thinking about Q-Day (the point when quantum computers can crack current encryption standards). As noted in a recent CyberArk post, identity security is the foundation for crypto-agility as we prep for quantum-resistant machine certs.
• Unified Governance: You can't have five different tools for aws, azure, and your saas apps. Centralizing this mess is the only way to avoid a total visibility collapse.

I’ve seen retail teams struggle when a "smart" inventory bot starts calling apis it shouldn't because its training data was slightly off. If you don't have boundaries, you're just waiting for an outage.

Anyway, the future of identity isn't just about locking doors—it’s about knowing exactly who (or what) has the keys in real-time. Good luck out there.