Imagine a digital workforce that outnumbers your human employees ten times over, operates 24/7, and has access to your most sensitive data. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the reality of non-human identities (NHIs) in your digital infrastructure. Be it API keys or service accounts, these entities are adding a whole new dimension to cybersecurity as we know it.
What are non-human identities?
Non-human identities are the invisible workforce powering our digital ecosystems. These digital credentials automate access and operations within our IT environments, enabling seamless interactions between systems without human intervention. While they have roots in simple service accounts of the old, they’ve evolved dramatically with the rise of cloud computing and automation.
Manifesting in the form of API keys orchestrating data exchanges to OAuth tokens facilitating secure third-party access, NHIs have now become the silent enablers of our increasingly automated tech space.
What are the challenges in non-human identity management?
The increase in their usage was inevitable, but the sheer scale we now see is staggering. What began as a handful of service accounts in on-premises data centers has exploded into a vast digital workforce. Current estimates suggest NHIs outnumber human identities by X45 in most organizations. Let’s discuss some of the key issues this new reality presents:
1. Increased complexity and lack of visibility
The sheer volume and diversity of NHIs directly impact their visibility across the organization. They span on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, making comprehensive oversight daunting. Their dynamic nature, especially in DevOps and cloud-native environments, means they are often created and destroyed rapidly, further complicating tracking efforts. Solutions such as Entro are emerging to address this challenge, offering comprehensive discovery and inventory capabilities across diverse environments, repositories, and communication channels.
2. Access management difficulties
In contrast to the standing principle of least privilege for their human counterparts, NHIs tend to be granted more permissions than necessary. While this happens mostly because of convenience, the excess privilege granted to these identities may also stem from developers’ lack of understanding or the difficulty in determining the exact access needs for each identity, which is a huge hurdle.
3. Limitations of traditional security measures
Many conventional security approaches that work well for human users are ill-suited for NHIs, creating significant security gaps. For instance, multi-factor authentication (MFA), a standard security measure for human users, is often not applicable or practical for NHIs. These identities typically rely on long-lived credentials, making continuous authentication challenging.
Traditional user behavior analytics tools may also fail to detect anomalies in NHI activities, as machine-to-machine interaction patterns can vastly differ from human user behaviors.
4. Audit and compliance complexities
Tracking and logging NHI activities across diverse systems can be challenging, often resulting in incomplete or fragmented audit trails. This makes it difficult to investigate incidents or demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements. Many regulatory frameworks must be designed with NHIs in mind, creating ambiguity in compliance efforts and leaving organizations uncertain about applying existing regulations to these digital entities.
NHIs you need to be on the lookout for
We have discussed the challenges NHIs present in great detail. Now, let’s take a look at NHIs that need our attention:
- API Keys: Unique identifiers for API access and authentication. They often have broad permissions which make them prime targets for adversaries.
- oAuth tokens: Enable secure, delegated access to resources without sharing credentials.
- Connection strings: Contain information to connect to databases or other data sources that can provide direct access to databases if exposed.
- Encryption keys: Fundamental for data protection in transit and at rest. Their compromise can lead to decryption of sensitive data, exposing vast amounts of protected information.
- Security certificates: Authenticate system identities and encrypt data transmissions, which can be used to impersonate legitimate services if compromised.
- Service accounts: These are used by applications or services to interact with other resources, but they often have elevated privileges and long-lived credentials, making them attractive targets.
- Cloud workload identities: These are used among cloud resources that become risky in multi-cloud and hybrid environments, potentially affecting large-scale infrastructure.
Best practices for non-human identity management
Here are some best practices to effectively manage and secure non-human identities:
1. Comprehensive inventory and classification
Maintain a complete, up-to-date inventory of all NHIs across your infrastructure. Classify these identities based on purpose, access level, and associated risk.
2. Enforcing least privilege access
Apply the principle of least privilege to all NHIs, granting only the minimum permissions necessary for their intended functions. Implement just-in-time (JIT) access to enhance security further.
3. Secrets rotation
Implement automated processes for regular rotation of secrets associated with NHIs. Frequent rotation limits the window of opportunity for attackers if credentials are compromised and ensures that expired or unused credentials are promptly invalidated.
4. Continuous monitoring
Deploy robust monitoring solutions to track NHI activities in real time and look for unusual behavioral patterns or access attempts. Your secrets security is only as good as your anomaly detection. Ensure you have audit logs that cover the entire lifecycle of a secret from creation to retirement. Give thought to how and where these secrets are stored. These are not just best practices but legal compliance requirements in industries like healthcare and financial services.
What an ideal NHI management tool should do
The perfect non-human identity management solution must offer certain specific capabilities. For instance, it must come with centralized visibility across diverse environments. Equally crucial is the ability to automatically discover and classify NHIs across the entire IT ecosystem so your inventory remains up-to-date.
Next, we need robust risk assessment and prioritization features. For example, we need alerts for leaked secrets that have already expired rather than database credentials published on a public repository. To that end, the solution should be capable of evaluating the risk associated with each type of non-human identity and prioritizing them based on their potential security impact.
Future trends in non-human identity management
As the scope of managing NHIs evolves, two key trends emerge at the forefront. First, according to recent research from IBM, AI-driven anomaly detection can automatically identify unexpected changes in behavior patterns, enabling real-time threat detection and response. This technology is particularly valuable for monitoring many machine-to-machine interactions in modern IT environments, where traditional manual monitoring approaches fall short.
Second, we can expect Zero Trust principles to be extended to non-human identities. Microsoft’s Zero Trust model emphasizes the importance of verifying and securing human and non-human identities with strong authentication across the entire digital estate.
All in all, the promise of integrating AI/ML and Zero Trust architectures for non-human identity management will go a long way toward enhancing security, improving efficiency, and providing better control over the expanding ecosystem of digital identities.
Written By Itzik Alvas, CEO and Co-founder of Entro
Itzik has over 15+ years of R&D and management experience. Itzik started his career as a DevOps engineer in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). He then moved on to managing R&D groups with an emphasis on cloud compliance and information security in leading organizations such as Microsoft and Macabbi, the leading health provider in Israel, where he held the role of the CISO. In 2021 Itzik co-founded Entro Security, the first and only holistic Secrets Security Platform.
