A non-human identity is an identity used by applications, services, scripts, devices, or workloads rather than by a human user. It matters because modern automation depends heavily on machine access, and these identities often accumulate broad privileges with less oversight.
What is a Non-Human Identity?
Non-human identities include service accounts, API principals, workload identities, bot accounts, certificates, tokens, and cloud roles used by software and infrastructure. They are essential to automation but can become high-value targets if they are overprivileged or poorly governed.
Common Non-Human Identity Risks
Common risks include long-lived credentials, excessive permissions, poor ownership, hidden dependencies, stale service accounts, and secrets embedded in code or automation.
Non-Human Identity vs. User Identity
User identities represent people. Non-human identities represent systems, applications, or automated processes acting without direct human login.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are non-human identities important in modern security?
Because cloud, DevOps, and application automation rely on them heavily, and compromise of one powerful machine identity can create a large blast radius.
How do teams reduce non-human identity risk?
By improving ownership, least privilege, rotation, secret handling, short-lived credentials, and visibility into where machine identities are used.
Related Cybersecurity Terms
- Secrets Management
- Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM)
- Least Privilege Access
- Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)
