What are non-human identities (NHI) and who owns their security?

Non-human identities (NHI) are gaining significant attention right now among enterprise identity teams and industry analysts. These groups are waking up to the fact that multiplying identities for digital assets poses more of a threat than traditional human identities. That’s because the rise of cloud and hybrid infrastructure is creating millions of microservices, kube clusters, and VMs to provision and control.

But who’s been managing these non-human identities so far? Why all the attention now? And what does non-human identity have to do with secrets management?

In this blog post, you’ll learn

• Why NHIs create security gaps
• Who should own NHI management
• Why developer experience matters for reducing risk

»What exactly is a non-human identity?

Human identity is fairly straightforward. These are the people who work for your company, including employees and contractors. Human identities could also include people who work for your customers and partners.

On the other hand, non-human identities include both machine and organizational identities. Machine identities include device IDs (such as desktop, mobile, and IoT devices) and workload identities (for containers, services, VMs, and applications).

»Why are non-human identities hard to secure?

Because hundreds, thousands, or even millions of services or other software entities can be running in a system, the scale of non-human identities can quickly outnumber human users in an organization. This presents unique security challenges that traditional identity-access management (IAM) approaches weren't designed to handle.

Traditional IAM thinking makes perfect sense for human identities: Manually create accounts, assign minimum necessary permissions, rotate credentials regularly, and monitor access patterns. But when you're dealing with Kubernetes clusters spinning up hundreds of pods per minute — each with their own service accounts, API keys, and certificates that need to talk to databases, message queues, external APIs, and each other — you need a different playbook that prioritizes automation and central enforcement. This is especially true as AI agents proliferate, creating even more autonomous services that need access control and audit.

»Handling NHIs through secrets management

While the industry is moving to a passwordless and trust-based approach to enabling access for non-human identities and machines, many systems still rely on standard key-value pairs to function (e.g., secrets, tokens, and passwords). Secrets management is the practice of ensuring every machine system that needs to access another is authenticated and authorized to do so based on policy. Secrets management also provides secure encryption of these secrets and just-in-time or dynamic creation to reduce the risk of credentials being active for a long time and increase your attack surface if compromised.

Secrets management is one component of non-human identity and access management. Certificate management is also critical to authenticate devices and servers, as well as identity federation, discovery of unmanaged secrets and identities, and remediation workflows.

»Who owns NHIs?

Many organizations have identity and access management teams that usually sit within the IT team (focused on enabling the company to use technology effectively) or to security teams (focused on reducing risks). But DevOps teams, and more recently, platform teams, have often been more involved with managing NHIs for many years.

Think about it: Who's been managing the cloud IAM roles for your microservices? Who's handling certificate rotation for service mesh communication? Who's dealing with Kubernetes service accounts and RBAC policies? Who's managing API keys for CI/CD pipelines?

For many organizations today, it’s their platform team.

Platform engineers have been in the machine identity trenches because they had no choice. When your deployment pipeline breaks because a certificate expired, or when your application can't scale because the database password rotation required for SOC 2 is bottlenecked through a manual approval process, the platform team is typically the team trying to build cross-functional solutions. And, because machine identities and access are in the direct path of application uptime, this is a Tier 0 service (self-service). Access needs to “just work”, so app dev teams usually don’t want non-technical teams owning this layer of the stack.

Surprisingly to some IAM teams, platform teams often build better NHI management because they understand the simple fact that if something is hard for developers to use, it won't get used (and therefore won't actually improve security).

»What needs to happen: A platform and security-led approach

Identity teams bring deep expertise in security controls, compliance frameworks, and risk management. Platform teams bring operational reality and developer empathy. Neither can solve non-human identity risks alone, but together? That's the opportunity.

The best machine identity solutions we've seen come from identity and platform teams working together to answer one critical question: "How do we make the secure path the easiest path?"

This means:

• Identity teams need to think like product managers. Your "customers" are developers and platform engineers. If your solution adds friction to their daily workflow, they'll route around it. Every time.
• Platform teams need to think like security architects. Yes, that workload needs network access, but does it need admin privileges on the entire cluster? Probably not.
• Both teams need to obsess over developer experience. The most secure machine identity is one that developers don't have to think about. Period.

»What’s needed to reduce risks associated with NHIs?

If your company is starting to try to figure out how to get all of this under control, you should be looking for a solution focused on these things:

1. Central least-privileged policy, automatically enforced: At the scale of cloud infrastructure, manual approvals and tooling just don’t work. Your central teams need to define policy for what gets access to what for how long, and that needs to automatically execute across any environment you’re working in. Or else, you’re going to have security gaps.
2. Optimized developer experience: Because NHIs involve a variety of devices, applications, and services, developers need a unified way to interact with NHIs in any context. If tools and workflows are clunky and cumbersome, they’ll often go around your intended workflows.
3. Lifecycle management: Non-human identity isn’t set-it-and-forget-it. You need to monitor what is at risk, you need to protect access with authentication and enforcement, then you need to govern its full lifecycle – making sure access is rotated, revoked, or newly generated based on policy.

»How HashiCorp can help

If you’re struggling with how to manage NHIs at your company, check out HashiCorp’s Security Lifecycle Management portfolio of products. We’ve designed our products to help centrally control machine identity and access by enforcing policy across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Like good platform engineers, we obsess over platform and application engineering experiences.

Here’s how our products can help:

• Vault: Manage machine identity and access with secrets, certificates, and key management
• Vault Radar: Detect and remediate plaintext secrets in developer environments
• Boundary: Provide humans secure remote access to privileged targets and machine systems
• Consul: Discover and securely connect services across any runtime

Learn more about our security portfolio here.