What Are Non-Human Identities (NHIs)?

May 4
7 min read

Updated: May 5

Guide for IT and security professionals, DevOps engineers, and business leaders.

Almost every business today runs on two major types of identities: human and non-human.

Human identities belong to people who want to access systems and services, like employees who log in each morning, authenticate their identity, and log out at the end of the day. The other identities belong to possibly everything else: the service accounts, API keys, machine certificates, and more. Fascinatingly, the latter silently authenticates thousands of times per second, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, round the clock, without a human involved.

144:1

NHIs per human identity in enterprise (2025)

56%

Jump in the NHI-to-human ratio in a single year

97%

NHIs carry excessive privileges

44%

Tokens exposed outside secure vaults

Non-Human Identities have become the single largest unsecured attack surface in enterprise technology in 2026, actively compromising systems and services at scale.

This complete guide will help you understand what, how, and why about NHIs — and what your organization must know before they become more of a liability than an asset.

What Is a Non-Human Identity?

A non-human identity is a digital identity representing software, services, and devices — such as API keys, service accounts, and bots. Unlike a human identity (a username, password, and MFA token tied to a person), an NHI is typically a long cryptographic string — an API key, a token, a certificate, or a service account credential — to prove who it is and what it is allowed to do.

NHIs are not new to the security industry; they have existed for decades. What has changed is scale, complexity, and risk. As organizations move to cloud-native architectures, adopt DevOps practices, spin up microservices, and deploy AI agents, the number of NHIs in a typical enterprise has exploded — and the governance infrastructure around them has not kept pace.

NHI vs. Human Identities

Human and non-human identities differ fundamentally across lifecycle, authentication, privilege level, visibility, and governance ownership. This makes it essential to apply a distinct security approach to each.

Dimension	Human Identity	Non-Human Identity
Volume	Finite, tied to headcount (employee, contractor, partner)	Virtually unlimited — grows with every new app, service, bot, or AI agent
Lifecycle	Tied to employment — clear onboarding/offboarding	Often created without a lifecycle policy; frequently orphaned
Authentication	Username, password, MFA, SSO	Long cryptographic strings (API key), token, certificate, secret
Activity pattern	Predictable working hours and locations	Continuous, 24/7, often from multiple environments simultaneously
Privilege level	Mostly scoped to job role via RBAC or exception request	Often over-provisioned; 97% carry excessive privileges ( IBM's 2025 breach report)
Visibility	Centralized in directory (AD, Okta, etc.) or HR systems	Scattered across vaults, repos, CI/CD, cloud IAM, and SaaS tools
Governance owner	HR + Identity team	Often unclear — DevOps, platform, or security teams, or the owner, are in tension
Password rotation	Enforced by policy or system	Often never/less rotated; 7.5% of NHIs are over 5 years old
Typical count	1 per employee	50-144 per employee in modern enterprises

This table illustrates the wide gap between the two identity types across creation, operation, and governance. The traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) system often fails to secure NHIs, as these identities break nearly all of its core assumptions simultaneously. This is the NHI governance gap — and attackers know it better than most security teams do.

Types of Non-Human Identities and Their Risks

Non-Human Identities are of different types and forms. They have different technical characteristics and hence different associated security risks, operational difficulties, and controls.

Service Accounts: Service accounts are user-like accounts created in a directory (Active Directory, LDAP, or cloud IAM) and assigned to applications, services, or automated processes rather than people. Their main purpose is to run applications, scheduled tasks, or background services, easing the time-consuming manual work. They are also among the oldest and most common forms of NHI.

Over time, they acquire excessive privileges without even being noticed. Their passwords rarely change or rotate, and they often remain for a longer duration after the application they were created for has been retired, creating a dangerous lock between security and operations.
API Keys: These are alphanumeric strings authenticating programmatic requests to web APIs. Generated by developers, they are popular in SaaS and cloud environments used for connecting applications, enabling third-party integrations, and powering developer workflows.

They are the most often leaked credential type. They are integrated into source code, pasted into Slack messages, or accidentally committed to public GitHub repositories. Once they are exposed, a breach happens in a few minutes. According to Entro Security, 44% of tokens are exposed in platforms outside of secure vaults.
OAuth Tokens and Refresh Tokens: they allow applications to act on behalf of a user or service without exposing passwords. Short-lived access tokens grant specific permissions; long-lived refresh tokens generate new access tokens without re-authentication.

Bearer token holders have access without further authentication. Compromised refresh tokens can go unnoticed, providing continuous access for days, even months, without detection, which was the case with the 2025 Salesloft-Drift breach.
Machines Certificates (PKI/TLS): These are cryptographic certificates issued by a Certificate Authority (CA) that establish the identity of a machine, server, or service in a network. They underpin TLS/HTTPS, mutual TLS (mTLS), and zero-trust network architectures.

When certificates expire unnoticed, they take down critical services instantly. When improperly managed, they can be spoofed or stolen. In containerized and microservice environments, certificate lifespans are shrinking — some are now valid for only hours or days — dramatically increasing the operational burden of certificate lifecycle management.
Workload Identities: are credentials assigned to cloud workloads — virtual machines, containers, serverless functions, or Kubernetes pods — that allow those workloads to authenticate to cloud services (AWS IAM roles, Azure Managed Identities, GCP Service Accounts) without embedding static credentials.

They are designed to be short-lived, but misconfiguration is common. Auto-scaling environments dynamically create workloads with identities inheriting broad privileges.
Bot and RPA Identities: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots and software bots are NHIs that are built to automate tasks that were previously supposed to be performed by humans, like manually filling out forms, running reports, and processing. Their authentication is done by inherited credentials.

They are often created outside of security review processes. They often operate with the same privileges as the human employee whose workflow they replaced — a significant over-provisioning risk.
AI Agent Identities (The Emerging Frontier): These are independent software solutions powered by large language models (LLMs) that have the capability to plan, act, communicate with external APIs, and interact with enterprise systems with the least human input. 2026 has observed them as the fastest-growing branch of NHI.

According to Gartner, agentic AIs are a technology trend for 2025, and by 2028, 33% of enterprise applications will have AI agents integrated.

Interestingly, these AI agents require their own set of credentials, like API keys, OAuth tokens, and service accounts, to operate, while in static automation, AI agents dynamically adapt to the environment. Latter overexploits by possessing extra privileges and access beyond their initial scope.

The biggest AI agent identity challenge is that AI agents are NHIs that can create other NHIs. Thus, their number is increasing at an alarming rate. There are more sub-agents in the market, each with their own credentials, increasing the scope and surface of attack. This identity generation and evolution is unprecedented in the history of identity management.

The Scale Problem With NHIs Outnumbering Humans

The trajectory of NHIs these days is not linear; rather, it is accelerating. The data shows a clear picture of the same. According to Entro Security's 2025 NHI & Secrets Report, the ratio of non-human to human identities grew from 92:1 to 144:1 — a 56% jump within a year, which is majorly driven by cloud-native architecture, DevOps automation, and SaaS integration sprawl.

This scale problem with growing NHIs,

along with excessive privileges and exposed tokens that are growing wild, creates chaos and invites attackers to exploit systems and services.

Cloud-native architecture. Every microservice, container, and serverless function requires its own individual identity. A unified application that initially had one service account now multiplies to become 100 microservices with 100 individual identities — each with different access requirements, different lifecycles, and different risk profiles.

DevOps and CI/CD automation. Modern deployment pipelines usually generate temporary credentials for each build, deploy credentials for each environment, and maintain long-lived service accounts for pipeline coordination. A single deployment can create dozens of transient NHIs.

SaaS integration sprawl. Every SaaS tool connected to your stack via OAuth or API key creates a new NHI. The average enterprise uses hundreds of SaaS applications, each with multiple integration points.

The result is that NHI management has become an infrastructure-scale problem. Manual governance approaches — spreadsheets, periodic audits, ticket-based access reviews — simply cannot operate at this volume. Organizations require automated, continuous, policy-driven governance.

Conclusion

Non-human identities are no longer a niche concern buried in a DevOps ticket queue. They are the fastest-growing, least-governed, and most actively exploited layer of the modern enterprise attack surface.

In this guide, we have established the foundation: what NHIs are, how they fundamentally differ from human identities, the seven distinct types that exist across your environment today, and why their scale — now outpacing humans by 144:1 — has made manual governance structurally impossible.

Understanding NHIs is the first and most critical step toward securing them. Organizations that treat machine identities as an afterthought are leaving their most active, most privileged, and least visible credentials entirely unprotected — and attackers are well aware of that gap.

The question is no longer whether your organization has a non-human identity problem. At the scale modern enterprises operate, every organization does. The question is whether you have the visibility, governance, and controls in place to manage it before it manages you.

Managing non-human identities is not a one-time fix — it is an ongoing responsibility that demands continuous attention. As an AI-enabled identity security system integrator with 24×7×365 managed services, IDMEXPRESS is here to ensure your organization stays ahead of NHI risks, every hour of every day.