What Are Non-Human Identities, and Why Should Security Teams Care?

Security breaches are increasingly expensive and harder to spot, extending beyond common attacks like phishing. Attackers are now targeting the least visible parts of your infrastructure: non-human identities (NHIs). 

NHIs outnumber human identities by 45:1 in cloud environments—these include service accounts, APIs, applications, and bots that interact with systems and access sensitive data. Unlike human users, NHIs don’t trigger typical alerts, allowing silent, prolonged operation with valid credentials. The consequences of a compromised NHI can be severe: attackers can gain unauthorized access to your sensitive data, spin up costly cloud resources, or even create new backdoors that lock you out of your own systems. 

It takes an average of 258 days to identify and contain a data breach—that’s more than eight months of dangerous exposure. Therefore, comprehensive prevention strategies are more time-sensitive and critical than ever for protecting non-human identity risks. 

What are non-human identities?

Non-human identities (NHIs) refer to any entity interacting with your systems that’s not a human user—for example, containers, workloads, and even scripts or schedulers. As environments scale, so does the number of NHIs, often into the thousands. These identities often need access to infrastructure, databases, or third-party services like human users, but they behave very differently. Many NHIs are spun up automatically by tools like Terraform or Kubernetes, making them harder to track and secure.

For example, a CI/CD pipeline that deploys code to production might use a service account to authenticate with your cloud provider. A monitoring tool might also use an API key to access logs and metrics. These identities don’t login through a UI or use passwords like humans do, but they still hold permissions.

However, the problem isn’t that NHIs exist. It’s that they’re easy to forget, hard to monitor, and frequently over-permissioned. Many of them are granted broad, long-lasting access that no one remembers to review until a breach happens, leading to a loss of revenue or data. This inherent lack of oversight and tendency towards excessive access directly conflicts with the core principles of zero trust, which mandates that no identity (human or non-human) should be implicitly trusted. Applying zero trust to NHIs is crucial to mitigate these risks, as we’ll explore later. 

Non-Human vs. Human Identities

A human identity represents a person, like someone logging into a dashboard. In contrast, non-human identities represent systems or services performing automated tasks without human intervention, like an API key or service account.

For example, a developer logging into a system to deploy code is a human identity. At the same time, a microservice in your architecture, fetching data from a database using an API key, is a non-human identity. In this case, no one is “logging in,” but activities are being carried out.

Table 1: Key Differences Between Human and Non-Human Identities

Category	Human identities	Non-human identities
Who or what?	Actual people, such as engineers and development teams.	Systems, services, applications, bots.
Access type	Through a console, Command Line Interface (CLI), or a User Interface (UI)	Programmatic access using scripts, APIs, or automation.
Authentication	Multi-factor authentication, passwords, SSO.	API tokens, keys, service account credentials.
Credential lifespan	Regularly updated or rotated.	Long-lived.
Monitoring	Can be tracked via usernames or audit trails.	Harder to track and often overlooked.

5 Examples of Non-Human Identities

NHIs appear in many forms. Below are five of the most common examples security teams should track.

1. API Keys

API keys are secret tokens that let apps and services talk to each other. Imagine a chatbot pulling data from a customer support system using an API key. If that key is leaked or not rotated regularly, attackers can hijack it and steal data.

2. Cloud Services

Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud use built-in identities to manage their own services. They often use identity and access management (IAM) roles to interact with your virtual machines and resources (for example, a monitoring service checking the health of a virtual machine). When permissions aren’t carefully controlled, they can expose sensitive parts of your infrastructure.

3. Containers and Images

Containers like Docker package code and dependencies so apps can run consistently across environments. A Docker container running a Node.js app will have to assume an IAM role to fetch secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. 

4. DevOps Tools

DevOps tools rely on non-human identities to build, test, and deploy applications and function securely. These tools often need credentials to access repositories, databases, or cloud resources. They can become risky gateways into your infrastructure without tight control and audit. For example, Terraform won’t just automatically create resources in your AWS account—it needs an AWS IAM role or authorization.

5. Service Accounts

A service account is an identity that applications or services use to interact with other systems. For example, a backup tool might use a service account to copy files from a server to cloud storage. The service account runs quietly in the background, but it can become a serious risk if it has too much access or gets exposed.

4 Security Risks of Non-Human Identities You Can’t Ignore – Plus Security Strategies to Mitigate Them

Security teams must understand where these identities exist, their privilege levels, what they’re allowed to do, and how to manage them effectively. Here are five security risks of non-human identities and how to handle them.

1. Excessive Permissions

Many non-human identities have more access controls than they actually need. A service account meant to read data might also be able to write or delete it simply because no one took the time to restrict its permissions. This over-permissioning increases the chances of a breach and accidental mistakes. 

To stay secure, follow the principle of least privilege: give each identity the smallest set of permissions it needs and nothing more. Review these permissions regularly and remove anything unnecessary.

2. Lack of Visibility and Governance

It’s common for organizations to lose track of the non-human identities they create. Developers spin up test credentials or containers and forget about them. Without a central view of who owns what, orphaned identities pile up and become invisible doors into your system. These forgotten, untracked accounts are often referred to as “shadow NHIs,” and they present a growing blind spot in security posture assessments.

When a breach happens, detecting where the leak came from becomes difficult. To reduce the risk, build a clear inventory of all NHIs, tag each with an owner, and set expiration dates or alerts for inactivity.

3. Insecure Credential Management

Where and how do you store your credentials? Do you hardcode them? Share them in Slack or let them sit in plain text config files? If one of these leaks, it can act like a master key for attackers. This kind of exposure is one of the fastest paths to a data breach. 

If you use AWS cloud services, a better approach is to manage secrets using secure tools like AWS Secrets Manager. Avoid hardcoded credentials, use environment variables, shut down inactive accounts, and rotate static credentials regularly to limit the damage if one gets exposed.

4. Lateral Movement Potential

When attackers gain access to one NHI, they often try to move sideways within your system. For example, if they take over a compromised container, they might use its permissions to reach your storage buckets, databases, or other services. This kind of lateral movement turns a small breach into a much bigger one. 

To reduce this risk, isolate non-human identities wherever possible. Use network segmentation, enforce zero-trust principles, and monitor their behavior for unusual activity that could signal a problem.

What Happens When NHIs are Attacked

When an NHI is compromised, the bad actor can move through your systems unnoticed. Unlike human users, NHIs don’t trigger login alerts or password reset workflows. They are fully integrated into your automation, which means an attacker can silently operate with valid credentials, often for weeks or months, before anyone notices.

The consequences? They gain unauthorized access to your data, spin up costly cloud resources, or even create new backdoors, and even worse, lock you out of your own system. 

These risks aren’t a fantasy scenario—they are happening now, in the real world. 

For example, in December 2024, an overprivileged API key was compromised in the BeyondTrust Remote Support SaaS environment. This static, unmanaged non-human identity allowed attackers to reset local application passwords and escalate privileges, demonstrating how unmanaged NHIs can be misused.

Just a few months earlier, in September 2023, Microsoft AI researchers inadvertently exposed a Shared Access Signature (SAS) token, functioning as a non-human identity, which granted full access to an Azure Storage account. This attack led to a massive leak of over 38TB of sensitive data.

Also, in late 2023, a compromised service account breached the Okta support system. This non-human identity lacked sufficient monitoring, allowing attackers to steal customer artifacts containing credentials, prompting one customer to rotate 5,000 exposed credentials. That’s why early detection and controlled, time-bound access are essential. When NHIs are attacked, the damage is always costly.

How to Stay Secure Against Non-Human Identity Risks

The principle of least privilege (PoLP) is a foundational tenet of robust cybersecurity, especially for non-human identities (NHIs). Least privilege asserts that any user, program, or process should be granted only the minimum necessary access to perform its legitimate function—and no more. Just-in-time (JIT) access is the practice of granting permissions only when needed, and revoking them immediately after, reducing the attack surface from standing privileges.  JIT access is a fundamental means to achieving the principle of least privilege.

Implementing just-enough access ensures an NHI only has precisely the permissions required for its task, which keeps the blast radius, data security risks, and possibility for lateral movement to a minimum. By continually right-sizing permissions, you combat the accumulation of redundant or over-privileged access that often leads to shadow access. This approach reinforces a zero trust security model, where no identity, human or non-human, is implicitly trusted, and every access request is validated against strict, minimal permissions.

A platform like Apono proves invaluable for enforcing the principles of least privilege and zero trust for all your identities. Apono provides a modern, automated approach to access management that helps enforce just-enough access by allowing you to:

• Suggest automated, right-sized access flows across your entire stack to minimize privileged access without hurting productivity.
• Enforce the principles of least privilege and zero trust, minimizing the risks associated with excessive permissions.
• Enable on-demand, self-serve, granular permissions directly from Slack, Teams, or your CLI. Apono ensures that NHIs (and human users) get exactly what they need when they need it, simplifying the path to least privilege adoption.

Automate Just-in-Time Access and Give NHIs Just-Enough Permissions with Apono

Non-human identities are essential, but they also introduce serious security risks when left unmanaged. From excessive permissions to poor credential hygiene, NHIs can quietly expose your systems to breaches.

Apono helps you take back control. As a cloud-native access management platform, Apono enforces least privilege and zero trust by automating just-in-time access, granting permissions only when needed, and revoking them right after. This approach minimizes standing privileges and reduces your attack surface. With features like auto-expiring access, one-click break glass flows, and quick deployment, Apono simplifies secure access across your stack. Book here to see a demo.