The unseen risk: Securing NHIs in your infrastructure

Non-human identities (NHIs) are digital entities complete with permissions, access scopes, and defined roles that enable applications, services, and devices to authenticate and execute operations without human intervention.

In cloud environments, NHIs typically take the form of cloud-native identity constructs:

• AWS IAM roles
• Azure Managed Identities
• Google Cloud Service Accounts

While these identities come with granular permissions, they’re often created without security oversight, monitored inconsistently, and rarely decommissioned. This creates identity sprawl, and usually secret sprawl. Let’s explore how this happens and what you can do about it.

»NHIs remain a blind spot for security teams

NHIs now outnumber human employees, creating visibility gaps and expanding attack surfaces that traditional identity management approaches weren't designed to address. According to the NHI Management Group, 80% of identity-related breaches now involve compromised non-human credentials. These credentials are scattered across systems, created in silos, and almost never governed with the same rigor as human accounts.

»Why machine identities fall through the cracks

NHI sprawl stems from fundamental gaps in how organizations approach machine identity management compared to human identity processes.

1. There’s no centralized governance. While human accounts are managed through IAM platforms, non-human identities are more often than not spun up ad hoc by dev teams without any system of record.
2. Security is often left out. Developers create service accounts, API keys, and tokens in the moment to solve an immediate problem. These secrets get hard coded into configuration files and repos. It’s the fastest way to ship, but it bypasses security entirely.
3. There’s no clear ownership or lifecycle. Human identities follow onboarding and offboarding processes. Machine credentials do not. Secrets created during a sprint often live on long after their purpose has expired.

»Preventing NHI sprawl starts with visibility

HCP Vault Radar helps teams ensure NHI accounts remain secure with visibility into secrets (passwords or tokens) that have been inadvertently exposed. It scans source code, developer environments, CI/CD pipelines, and collaboration tools to identify AWS keys, JWTs, SSH credentials, and API tokens. Pattern recognition and context-aware scanning help reduce false positives and surface what matters most. Real-time detection through pre-commit hooks and CI/CD integration prevents secrets from entering production as developers create new machine identities.

For broader visibility across your infrastructure, IBM Verify Identity Protection extends Radar’s reach by helping you understand how machine identities are used in real-time and can flag abnormal activity.

»Control the full lifecycle of non-human identities

Before you can secure NHIs, it's important to control how they’re created and what they can access. Left unchecked, NHI sprawl happens when identities are created without clear purpose, policy, or lifecycle ownership. HashiCorp Vault plays a critical role in how they’re authenticated, authorized, and governed once provisioned.

Vault allows organizations to apply access rules to existing NHIs, categorize them by leveraging namespaces, and ensure credentials are scoped appropriately. Instead of granting broad access, Vault enables least-privilege design through short-lived or dynamic secrets. This limits exposure and reduces the risk of over-permissioned machine accounts.

»Prioritize and respond faster

When machine credentials leak, every second counts. Vault Radar delivers real-time alerts and automated notifications the moment an exposure is detected. This shrinks the attack window and prevents the months or years long exposures that make non-human identities so dangerous.

Alerts integrate directly into your existing incident response workflows through JIRA, PagerDuty, and Slack, so they reach the right teams. Each finding comes with contextual insights like author, source, type, and severity level, helping teams triage secrets and focus on remediating those with the highest risk.

»Governance that works for developers

Vault Radar doesn’t just stop at detection. It makes remediation part of the developer workflow. Vault Radar routes findings directly to the code owner with context and guidance so issues can be fixed at the source.

Once secrets are remediated, they can be imported into Vault for proper lifecycle management. That means rotation, expiration, and compliance reporting all handled centrally, with audit logs in place to meet requirements like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Vault ensures that secrets are actively managed over time.

»Transforming NHI security from reactive to proactive

Vault Radar shifts NHI management from reactive to proactive. It finds the secrets that are often overlooked, evaluates their risk, and turns them into managed assets. That means tighter security, fewer production issues, faster audits, and workflows that make secure practices the easiest path forward.

Start with a free trial of Vault Radar and see what’s hiding in plain sight.