In today’s multi-cloud and distributed environments, managing identities is more complex than ever, especially when dealing with non-human identities (NHIs). These NHIs, like service accounts, service principals, and other machine identities, silently operate across an ever-growing landscape of cloud platforms, applications, and on-premises systems – enabling tasks like automating backups, managing container deployments, and facilitating communication between microservices. However, while these unseen workhorses are essential to keeping businesses running smoothly, they also pose significant security risks if left unmanaged. This blog post will demonstrate how Veza helps organizations effectively manage NHIs through several key use cases, both mitigating compliance risk and enhancing security.
The Hidden Complexity of NHIs
NHIs may not require the same level of direct interaction as human users, who regularly change roles, take on new responsibilities, and request additional access over time. NHIs are often created for a specific task and then left to operate in a ‘set it and forget it’ fashion. Unlike human identities, which are subject to ongoing adjustments, NHIs persist in the background with static permissions, making them easy to overlook yet critical to monitor. They are often highly privileged, access sensitive data, and if left unchecked, can introduce significant security risks.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, NHIs play a crucial and often overlooked role in the development and training of AI models. These digital entities are essential to these workloads behind the scenes, enabling the massive data processing and complex interactions necessary for creating sophisticated AI systems. NHIs play a pivotal role in AI development and operation, including data collection and processing, model training and iteration, and distributed computing and scalability. Addressing the security and monitoring challenges associated with these digital entities is crucial for ensuring the integrity, reliability, and trustworthiness of AI systems. Organizations must prioritize robust NHI management to harness the full potential of AI while mitigating associated risks.
Given the rapid growth and complexity of NHIs, it’s understandable that many organizations have yet to fully incorporate them into their identity security strategies. However, forward-thinking security teams are now prioritizing this area, recognizing the unique risks, and taking proactive steps to ensure these critical assets are managed and secured.
The complexity of managing NHIs is amplified by their sheer number and diversity across various systems. According to the Veza State of Access report, NHIs outnumber human identities by a staggering 17 to 1. Unlike human identities, which are typically well-documented and easier to track, NHIs can proliferate rapidly – often depending upon manual processes like naming conventions to identify them. NHI ownership is often tracked in a spreadsheet, or not at all. This lack of visibility can create blind spots, where NHIs without owners or with unrotated secrets remain unnoticed, increasing the attack surface. Effective security and governance requires not only the discovery of all NHIs across cloud and on-premises environments but also a robust system for continuously assigning and tracking owners, ensuring secrets rotation, and managing the NHI lifecycle to ensure that they don’t create a massive security gap for the organization.
Discovering NHIs and Risks
The first step in managing NHIs is discovering what’s out there. It sounds simple, but the complexity of enterprise environments makes this a challenging endeavor. NHIs exist across every part of the infrastructure – often without a clear way to see which accounts are associated with NHIs versus humans.
NHIs like service principals and service accounts can be challenging to identify without the right tools, as their presence often extends across distributed and complex infrastructures. Veza simplifies this process, making NHIs easily identifiable and enabling security teams to gain a comprehensive understanding of their footprint. Veza’s approach includes:
- Identifying accounts that are defined NHIs, such as service principals and AD Managed Service Accounts
- Leveraging intelligence to spot clear NHI indicators, like accounts without console access
- Providing advanced search and filtering capabilities to locate and label probable NHIs based on naming conventions or certain configurations such as lack of MFA
- Importing known NHIs from external sources
This multi-layered approach ensures even the most elusive NHIs are uncovered, transforming them from hidden liabilities into manageable assets.
Assigning Ownership: Accountability for NHIs
If no one owns an NHI, who knows how to fix something that goes wrong? Assigning human owners to NHIs is critical for remediation and accountability, yet it’s often neglected. Without clear ownership, credentials go unrotated, permissions grow stale, and security risks multiply.
These challenges for NHIs are especially acute in robotic process automation (RPA), specifically in compliance-sensitive areas like financial controls. As RPA bots increasingly handle critical tasks, they often require privileged access to sensitive systems and data. In compliance testing, where automated tasks are performed in heavily regulated areas, the actions of these non-human identities must be meticulously tracked, audited, and validated. The challenge lies in ensuring that these bots not only execute tasks accurately but also maintain a comprehensive audit trail that meets regulatory standards. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of RPA deployments, where bots may be created, modified, or decommissioned rapidly, complicates the task of maintaining consistent compliance and security protocols.
Veza addresses this by enabling organizations to assign Resource Owners or by importing existing data from spreadsheets and other sources. Importantly, Veza also links ownership back to the organization’s Identity Provider (IdP), attaching metadata like employment status to each owner. This allows security teams to easily identify when an NHI’s owner has left the organization, helping prevent orphaned identities from persisting unchecked.
By tying human owners directly to NHIs, Veza transforms identity governance from a guessing game into a streamlined process with continuous oversight. Human owners play an essential role in key rotation, reviewing permissions, and serving as points of accountability—ensuring that the “set-it-and-forget-it” mentality, which often leads to unmanaged NHIs, is avoided. This connection between human and non-human identities offers a critical advantage over alternative solutions, solidifying a robust identity security posture that automatically adapts as personnel change.
Ensuring Least Privilege for NHIs
Once NHIs are discovered and tracked, the next logical step is determining their entitlements. Unfortunately, NHIs are often created with far more privileges than they actually need. Unlike human employees, who typically go through defined onboarding processes to set appropriate access, NHIs can often slip through the cracks – sometimes because engineers create these accounts directly in target systems, bypassing centralized oversight. This lack of oversight often results in excessive permissions, as no one may take the time to right-size them..
Veza makes analyzing NHI permissions simple. By drilling down to individual actions at the system resource level, security and identity teams can quickly understand what an NHI can do. From here, permissions can be right-sized – adjusted to match only what is necessary for the NHI’s intended business function. This keeps your environment cleaner, more organized, and more secure. It’s a testament to the principle of least privilege that Veza has embedded into its platform from day one, always recognizing the unique challenges of NHIs.
Key Rotation: Closing the Security Gaps
Keys and credentials are a lifeline for NHIs. However, stale credentials pose one of the biggest security risks, as attackers can exploit outdated access keys to infiltrate systems. To combat this risk, key rotation is vital. Veza provides a valuable framework for managing credentials – highlighting staleness and alerting security teams when keys are overdue for rotation.
By leveraging metadata like “Time Last Rotated” and “Time Last Used,” Veza equips organizations with the context needed to manage keys effectively. This proactive approach not only ensures that credentials don’t become a backdoor into your infrastructure but also emphasizes the importance of having an assigned owner. If automatic rotation isn’t set up, the designated owner must take responsibility for manually rotating the keys, thereby helping to maintain compliance with security best practices.
Access Reviews: Keeping Permissions in Check
Just like human users, NHIs need access reviews to ensure their permissions align with the principle of least privilege. Often, high levels of privilege are granted to an NHI “just to get things going” with the best intentions of going back to implement tighter permissions at a later date. Without a review process, NHIs can persist as over-privileged, increasing the risk of a security incident. However, for some organizations, a simple check of ‘Is this NHI still needed?’ may suffice – a very lightweight process that can significantly mitigate risk.
Veza’s approach to access reviews for NHIs is centered on their assigned human owners. This mirrors the established processes for human accounts, making it an intuitive addition to existing identity management workflows. Owner-driven reviews offer an opportunity to catch and correct over-privileged NHIs, reducing the organization’s overall risk exposure. By conducting these reviews regularly, organizations maintain tighter control over the permissions their NHIs hold.
Monitoring Activity: Finding Dormant Permissions
One of the biggest challenges in managing NHIs is understanding their activity—or lack thereof. Dormant NHIs or those with permissions that are no longer needed represent a significant risk, as they can easily be exploited without anyone noticing.
Veza’s Activity Monitoring capabilities help identify dormant permissions and inactive accounts. By flagging these, Veza provides a path to not only fix over-privileged NHIs but also to tighten access controls in general. Dormant permissions are more than a nuisance – they’re a threat vector. By continuously monitoring NHI activity, organizations can eliminate unnecessary access and further support the principle of least privilege.
Role Recommendations: Proactively Right-Sizing NHIs
The best way to manage NHIs effectively is to get it right from the start. Instead of retroactively fixing over-permissioned accounts, Veza helps organizations create NHIs that are right-sized from day one. With role recommendations, Veza suggests appropriate permissions for new NHIs, ensuring that they have exactly what they need – nothing more, nothing less.
Optimizing the NHI provisioning process during account creation minimizes the risk of over-permissioning. It prevents NHIs from obtaining admin-level permissions they don’t need, significantly reducing the attack surface. By setting up NHIs correctly from the start, organizations avoid unnecessary complexity down the road.
Conclusion
NHIs may not be visible on an organizational chart, but they are very much a part of the operational fabric of modern enterprises. Properly managing NHIs requires discovering them, analyzing permissions, assigning ownership, rotating credentials, conducting access reviews, monitoring activity, and right-sizing new accounts—all essential steps in maintaining security and compliance.
The Veza Access Platform addresses every aspect of NHI management, from discovery to ongoing monitoring. By providing visibility, accountability, and control, Veza helps organizations transform NHIs from hidden vulnerabilities into managed assets – empowering businesses to grow confidently without sacrificing security.
Ready to take control of your NHIs and enhance your organization’s identity security posture? Discover how Veza can support you on this journey today.
