Executive Summary
NHIs power automation but pose significant risks if ungoverned. Industry experts across the board suggest that we treat them like human identities—discover, govern, and monitor them.
What Are Non-Human Identities?
Non‑human identities (NHIs) are digital identities, actors and credentials assigned to non‑person entities so they can authenticate, be authorized, and interact with systems, data, and services without manual human input.
Unlike human identities, NHIs are machine‑operated, often long‑lived, and typically used in high‑volume, automated workflows that underpin cloud, API, and microservices architectures.
These identities often proliferate silently as teams deploy new services and pipelines.
NHIs fall into several broad categories, these categories are aligned with Cloud Security Alliance, IBM, NHI Management Group standards plus emerging AI agent guidance:
- Service accounts: Dedicated accounts for applications or background jobs (e.g., "webapp‑db‑user", "backup‑service").
- API keys and tokens: Credentials used by APIs and microservices (such as cloud provider keys, OAuth client secrets).
- Machine or device identities: Certificates, OAuth tokens, SSH keys for servers, VMs, containers, and IoT devices.
- Automation identities: CI/CD runners, scripts, and orchestration tools.
- AI‑based agents: LLM‑powered bots that autonomously call APIs and modify data, increasingly treated as first‑class non‑human identities in modern governance frameworkas
- How NHIs Differ from Human Identities ?
- Human identities are usually lifecycle‑managed via HR‑driven onboarding and offboarding, while NHIs are often auto‑provisioned by infrastructure‑as‑code, cloud‑native tooling, or CI/CD pipelines and can persist long after they are needed