Identity-based cyberattacks continue to surge, with stolen credentials now playing a central role in most breaches. Recent data suggests that compromised secrets are involved in over 80% of incidents, highlighting how attackers increasingly favor credential theft over exploiting software vulnerabilities.
While much focus has been on protecting human identities, machine identities — or non-human identities (NHIs) — represent a far larger and growing attack surface. NHIs, which can include service accounts, API clients, and automated workloads, outnumber human identities in the enterprise by a factor of at least 50 to 1. Unlike human users, machines typically rely on secrets like API keys, tokens, and certificates for authentication — often without the safeguard of multi-factor authentication.
The Fragmented State of NHI Management
Organizations today struggle to maintain a clear inventory of their NHIs. Different environments — from Kubernetes clusters and cloud platforms to legacy systems — define and manage machine identities in incompatible ways. This fragmented approach makes it challenging to apply consistent security policies or automate governance, leaving organizations exposed to risk.
Compounding the problem is a lack of accountability and metadata around NHIs. Many machine identities are poorly documented, with unclear ownership or purpose. Over time, secrets tied to discontinued systems or temporary projects are forgotten, creating a hidden and growing security liability.
Secrets as the Foundation of Modern NHI Governance
Every NHI ultimately authenticates using a secret. When treated as unique identifiers, these secrets — whether short-lived tokens, API keys, or certificates — offer a powerful means of tracking and managing machine identities across platforms. A secret used for authentication becomes a traceable artifact, linking specific workloads or processes to a distinct identity and action.
This approach enables unified visibility across complex environments, helping security teams monitor NHIs regardless of where they operate. It also aligns naturally with Zero Trust principles: unused or expired secrets can be flagged for cleanup, reducing identity sprawl and eliminating ghost credentials.
Addressing the Risks of Secret Sprawl
However, secrets themselves are a common point of failure. Millions of secrets are exposed annually through public repositories, misconfigured systems, or neglected infrastructure. Once leaked, a secret grants attackers direct access to systems without further verification. Long-lived or over-permissioned credentials are especially dangerous, as they can provide attackers with broad, persistent access.
Managing these risks requires more than detecting leaked secrets. It demands a proactive, centralized inventory of all credentials, with robust metadata and lifecycle controls.
A Path Forward: Comprehensive NHI Security Through Secrets Management
Modern solutions now enable organizations to build cross-environment inventories of all secrets — whether stored securely in vaults or exposed elsewhere. By fingerprinting and contextualizing each credential, security teams can:
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Identify NHIs with leaked or duplicated secrets.
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Spot long-lived credentials that require rotation.
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Detect and decommission orphaned or unauthorized secrets.
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Enforce lifecycle policies like expiration and revocation.
By anchoring machine identity management to the secrets that authenticate them, organizations can move from reactive detection to proactive governance, closing critical gaps in their security posture and reducing the risk of identity-based attacks.
