When we think of cybersecurity and identity, usernames, passwords, and multi-factor authentication typically come to mind. But a much larger and growing risk hides in plain sight: the rise of Non-Human Identities (NHIs).
Far beyond simple service accounts, NHIs include service principals, Snowflake roles, IAM roles, and unique constructs from AWS, Azure, GCP, and more. Each is essential to today’s cloud-native, microservices-driven environments — yet each introduces significant security challenges.
The real danger lies in how these NHIs authenticate: through secrets such as API keys, tokens, and certificates. These credentials often go untracked, poorly managed, and overprivileged, creating massive vulnerabilities across organizations.
Recent studies show alarming trends:
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Over 23.7 million secrets were leaked publicly on GitHub in a single year.
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A large percentage of secrets leaked in previous years remain valid today.
The root causes are systemic. Machines cannot verify identity through prompts like humans do. Developers frequently create secrets with excessive permissions and long expiration periods to prioritize speed and avoid service disruptions. In many cases, secrets are hardcoded into codebases, passed between systems with little oversight, or forgotten entirely.
As a result, security teams face a sprawling and invisible attack surface. Detecting a compromised human account might trigger alerts; detecting compromised NHIs is far more difficult, as machine activity operates globally and continuously, blending into normal traffic.
Legacy identity management and privileged access management (PAM) solutions were never designed for this complexity. They excel with human users, but falter when faced with thousands of ephemeral machine accounts. Similarly, secrets managers can safely store credentials but can’t detect when those secrets are leaked, exposed, or abused across diverse environments.
Recognizing this urgent need, GitGuardian has introduced a solution: NHI Governance.
NHI Governance: A New Model for Machine Identity Management
GitGuardian’s NHI Governance solution offers a holistic approach to managing and securing machine identities.
Key capabilities include:
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Comprehensive Secrets Mapping: Visualize where secrets are stored, which services use them, and their associated risks.
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Lifecycle Management: Automate rotation, revoke unused credentials, and detect “zombie” secrets that have gone inactive.
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Security and Compliance Frameworks: Enforce consistent policies across vaults, measure secrets hygiene, and monitor compliance drift.
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AI Risk Mitigation: As AI agents increasingly access internal systems, NHI Governance scans messaging platforms, documents, and wikis to detect hidden secrets and sanitize logs before sensitive data is inadvertently leaked.
The explosion of AI-driven tools like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) only intensifies these risks. Secrets hidden in internal documents, Slack channels, or Jira tickets can now surface unexpectedly through AI interactions, exposing critical systems without any intentional breach.
Conclusion:
In today’s digital environment, machines outnumber humans by 50:1 or even 100:1 within corporate networks. Securing machine identities is no longer optional. Without robust governance over non-human identities and their secrets, organizations leave themselves open to undetected breaches, lateral movement, and catastrophic supply chain attacks.
A proactive, centralized, and intelligent governance strategy is the only way forward — and platforms like GitGuardian’s NHI Governance are setting a new standard for protecting the unseen layers of modern infrastructure.
