Understanding Non-Human Identity Management: A Unified Approach to Securing Secrets & Machine Identities

It is no ‘secret’ that Identity security, specifically those with non-human identities, has become the leading cause of breaches. Cloud transformation and AI has created an unprecedented number of non-human entities or machines. These machines have identities, and in many cases secrets (like credentials) used to authenticate them. These machine identities, critical for securing inter-machine communications, need robust detection, management, protection and secure access. Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) emerges as a solution to ensure the secure lifecycle of these identities, mitigating risks and enhancing operational efficiency.

The purpose of this blog is three fold:

• First, address what non-human identity management is and how is it associated with more established terms like Machine Identity management 
• Second, share what the three core capabilities of a NHI Platform should be 
• Third, why we believe a unified secrets and non-human identity platform strategy is the most comprehensive strategy for enterprises to govern secrets, NHI and/or machine identity management in the market today. 

What Is Non-Human Identity Management?

Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) refers to the discipline of identifying, managing, and securing the identities of non-human entities, such as applications, containers, microservices, and devices. These identities function as credentials, ensuring authentication, authorization, and secure communication across IT environments. Examples include API keys, certificates, encryption keys, and other machine-generated secrets.

Managing these identities ensures that machine-to-machine interactions are trustworthy, eliminating vulnerabilities that attackers might exploit. The management of secrets and non-human identities have become increasingly critical as they are now the leading cause of breaches and non-human identities continue to grow at an unprecedented rate, now approaching 50 non-human identities for every human identity. 

Is NHIM Synonymous with Machine Identity Management?

Yes, it is. Different vendors attempt to define it differently to position it as something new but if you peel the layers non-human identities and machine identities come down to the same things—identities for containers, microservices, applications, RPAs, devices, Services and scripts. All of which are, in fact, non-human. 

What Should a Non-Human Identity Management Platform Do? 

At its core, a non-human identity management platform should manage the entire lifecycle of non-human identities (machine identities). A non-human identity platform should be able to: 

1. Detect identities and their associated secrets 
2. Manage the secrets and protect the secrets from falling into the wrong hands 
3. Provide secure, granular access control to resources 

Lets dive into each of these capabilities a bit more: 

1. Detection 

Modern enterprises operate across multi-cloud environments with distributed teams. R&D departments frequently store secrets in scattered vaults, making it difficult for security teams to centralize and prioritize these identities. Identifying NHIs in complex environments is challenging, often leading to hidden vulnerabilities. Existing tools focus on detecting risks without offering effective remediation.

A true NHIM platform uses a single pane of glass to detect and manage NHIs across environments. Contextual enrichment of NHIs—with insights into usage, permissions, and relationships—helps prioritize risks. Further, it should remediate the issues using approaches like automated rotation of secrets without disrupting production and adoption of ephemeral secrets and reduced permissions for high-priority NHIs.

2. Management & Protection

An NHIM platform must ensure secure issuance, storage, rotation, and revocation of secrets, certificates and encryption keys. Capabilities in this area includes the following:

• Secrets Management: Simplify the management and protection of certificates, credentials, key. This also includes the ability to manage secrets in any vault and any cloud. 
• Certificate Lifecycle Management: Centralizes certificate issuance and renewal to prevent disruptions from expired certificates.
• Encryption & Key Management: Safeguards cryptographic keys essential for data security, reducing vulnerabilities from mismanagement.

These capabilities not only enhance security but also streamline compliance with regulatory standards.

3. Secure Access

Ensuring secure, granular access for non-human identities is vital. These essentially boil down to providing identity based secure access control that allows enterprises to enforce precise, least-privileged access for machines, preventing unauthorized interactions. This also needs to be done by simplifying secure access without compromising performance, critical for DevOps and CI/CD pipelines.

The Value of a Unified Non-Human Identity Management Platform

By integrating detection, management, protection, and secure access into one platform, enterprises can achieve:

1. Improved Visibility: A unified platform offers a comprehensive view of all NHIs, simplifying governance and reducing blind spots.
2. Enhanced Efficiency:  Cloud-native SaaS platforms that scale to meet growing demands of enterprises while consolidating multiple-product capabilities in a unified platform managed through a single pane of glass. 
3. Proactive Security: While the benefit of SaaS is apparent, the unified should ensure that the only entity in control of the machine identities and secrets is the enterprise. The platform should provide a practical and scalable path to “Secretless” management supporting advanced frameworks like SPIFEE in addition to current disciplines like Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP). 
4. Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Enterprises can reduce costs by investing in a unified platform that manages the entire lifecycle of NHIs, eliminating the need for multiple point products. It also increases operational efficiency by enabling lifecycle management through a single pane of glass.

About us 

Trusted by Fortune 100 companies and industry leaders, Akeyless is redefining identity security for the modern enterprise, delivering the world’s first unified Secrets & Non-human Identity platform designed to prevent the #1 cause of breaches – compromised identities and secrets. Backed by the world’s leading cybersecurity investors and global financial institutions including JVP, Team8, NGP Capital and Deutsche Bank, Akeyless Security delivers a cloud-native SaaS platform that integrates Vaultless Secrets Management with Certificate Lifecycle Management, Next Gen Privileged Access Management (Secure Remote Access), and Encryption Key Management to manage the lifecycle of all machine identities and secrets across all environments. 

Ready to see Non-Human Identity Management in action? Schedule your demo today.