As identity security becomes increasingly critical in cybersecurity, the focus has shifted from safeguarding human identities to protecting Non-Human Identities (NHIs)—such as API keys, service accounts, secrets, tokens, and certificates. While traditional approaches focused on managing users and their credentials, the rapid expansion of cloud services, automation, and APIs has accelerated the growth of machine-to-machine interactions. NHIs have become some of the most critical assets within an organization’s cybersecurity perimeter, facilitating business operations, automating processes, managing cloud services, and enabling seamless integration between applications and systems. However, as NHIs proliferate across cloud, SaaS, and on-premise environments, they also become significant attack vectors.
Organizations have recognized that NHIs present a unique and expanding attack surface. Managing them has become increasingly complex, decentralized, and fragmented. Many security teams focus on securing these identities by configuring them correctly, enforcing governance policies, and storing them securely in vaults. But that’s only part of the equation. The real question is no longer just “Are my NHIs secure?” but also “Who is using them, and are they being used legitimately?” and “How can I prevent attackers from exploiting NHIs, even if they are compromised?”
This article explores the complexity of securing NHIs and presents a fresh perspective: it’s not the identity itself that needs securing, but how it is being used.
The NHI Landscape: Complexity and Blind Spots
NHIs are embedded throughout an organization’s infrastructure, from cloud services and on-prem environments to CI/CD pipelines, code repositories, data warehouses, and third-party integrations. With estimates suggesting that NHIs now outnumber human identities by at least 45:1, securing them can be an overwhelming task.
What compounds this challenge is the fragmented nature of NHIs. API keys and service accounts, for instance, are often distributed across multiple platforms, each with its own security protocols. This fragmentation creates blind spots for security teams, making it difficult to maintain consistent oversight of how and where NHIs are used.
Traditional security practices focus on NHI lifecycle management—revoking stale identities, enforcing least privilege access controls, and configuring them properly. While these measures are necessary, they fail to address the core issue: trust. Who is using these NHIs, and can their usage be trusted?
Securing the Identity Is Not Enough
Context and trust are essential for NHI security. Consider an API key or service account as a car key: just because someone has the key doesn’t mean they are authorized to drive, nor does it guarantee proper usage. The key merely grants access—it doesn’t tell you who’s behind the wheel or what they intend to do. Similarly, NHIs grant access, but having the credentials doesn’t guarantee legitimate use.
For instance, an API key for cloud workloads can be exploited to escalate privileges or execute malicious operations if it falls into the wrong hands—even if the key itself is properly configured. Without continuous monitoring and validation, NHIs can become entry points for attackers.
While storing NHIs securely in vaults or secret stores is critical, it’s insufficient. Secure storage alone does not offer visibility into how NHIs are used once retrieved. It’s akin to locking a car key in a safe; once the key is out, how do you know who’s using it? Organizations need to go beyond storage and focus on securing the consumption of NHIs.
The Ephemeral Approach: Reducing Exposure Time
A key strategy to reduce NHI-related risk is the adoption of ephemeral credentials. Unlike long-lived credentials that remain vulnerable if exposed, ephemeral NHIs are short-lived and automatically expire after a set period. By dynamically generating and revoking these credentials, the attack surface is drastically reduced, and the window of opportunity for attackers is minimized.
Integrating ephemeral secrets into automated workflows, such as CI/CD pipelines or cloud-native environments, allows security teams to manage credentials seamlessly without business interruptions. This approach not only enhances security but also improves operational efficiency by reducing the overhead associated with managing long-lived credentials.
Moving Beyond Secret Rotations
Adopting a Zero Trust approach, where every NHI consumer is continuously validated, and embracing ephemeral credentials renders traditional secret rotations less effective. While rotating secrets or API keys regularly can limit the time an attacker has to exploit them, this practice has significant drawbacks:
- Ongoing Risk: Even frequent rotations leave windows of opportunity for attackers to exploit NHIs during their lifespan. Rotations do not address who is using the NHI, how it’s being used, or the intent behind its use.
- Resource-Intensive: Performing frequent rotations, such as hourly, is impractical and burdens security teams with significant operational overhead, diverting focus from other critical tasks.
- Potential Downtime: Frequent rotations may disrupt application availability, and missteps in the process can lead to downtime or skipped rotations, creating unintended security gaps.
- Team Friction: Secret rotations can introduce friction between security teams and other departments, like IT and DevOps, who are responsible for ensuring that rotations don’t disrupt services, creating operational bottlenecks.
Secret rotations can be an effective reactive measure, but they don’t address the core issue of context and trust. The focus should shift to continuous consumer validation and ephemeral identities, offering a more proactive solution.
Shifting Focus: From Configuration to Trust
While securely configuring and storing NHIs is important, it’s just the starting point. The true challenge lies in maintaining continuous trust and verification throughout the NHI’s lifecycle. Security teams must move beyond static controls and adopt a dynamic, context-aware approach where monitoring the real-time use of NHIs is as important as their initial setup. This approach ensures that NHIs are validated constantly and, where applicable, rendered volatile through ephemeral credentials, leaving no security gaps.
Actionable Steps for Security Teams
- Continuous Contextual Visibility Holistic visibility into all NHIs across the enterprise is essential. A contextualized inventory helps security teams understand each NHI’s origin, associated users, storage locations, consumers, and accessed resources, enabling effective monitoring.
- Continuous Monitoring and Behavioral Analytics Continuous monitoring builds trust in NHI usage. By analyzing normal usage patterns, security teams can detect anomalies—such as NHIs being used in unusual locations or accessing unfamiliar systems—that may indicate a compromise.
- Dynamic Trust Attribution Trust should be dynamic, not static. Regularly assess the entity behind each NHI, whether it’s an application, script, or automated process, ensuring its behavior aligns with expected patterns. This aligns with Zero Trust principles, where every request is continuously validated.
- Adopting Ephemeral NHIs Wherever possible, adopt ephemeral NHIs to minimize the risks associated with long-lived credentials. These short-lived identities are deleted after use, rendering them useless to attackers.
Conclusion
Securing NHIs requires more than lifecycle management and secure storage – it demands contextual visibility, continuous monitoring, and dynamic trust attribution. By embracing Zero Trust principles and adopting ephemeral credentials, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of breaches, ensuring that NHIs are only used by authorized and legitimate entities.
About the Author
Ofir Har-Chen is the Co-Founder & CEO of Clutch Security, the industry’s first Universal Non-Human Identity Security Platform, purpose-built for the enterprise. With over 15 years of experience in security and leadership roles, Ofir has managed large-scale incident response and preemptive engagements for Fortune 500 companies, and has led high-scale strategic development and fast-paced, customer-facing teams globally.
Ofir can be reached online at [email protected], and more information is available on Clutch’s website https://www.clutch.security/
