Think about all the accounts in your company. How many belong to real people? Fewer than you would guess. For every human who logs in, there are dozens of non-human identities (NHIs) running in the background.
These are things like API keys, service accounts, tokens, certificates, and AI agents. Their job is to let one piece of software talk to another. No human clicks a button. It all happens on its own.
Here is the part that surprises most teams. In a typical enterprise, machine identities outnumber human ones by roughly 82 to 1. Yet most security teams still manage identity as though only people have it, and that gap is the core problem.
This is why NHI security is now its own field. A widely shared 2026 prediction says 2026 is the year security can no longer focus on humans alone. Let us walk through what an NHI is, why there are so many, where the problem comes from, and what to do.
What Is a Non-Human Identity?
A non-human identity is a digital identity used by software, not a person. A human proves who they are with a password and maybe a fingerprint. Software cannot do that. So it uses a secret instead: a token, an API key, a certificate, or a key.
The software shows its secret, the other system checks it, and access is granted. If you use the cloud or any automation, you already have many of these. Common examples:
- Service accounts let an app connect to a database or another service.
- API keys and OAuth tokens let two apps share data. For example, a SaaS tool reading your CRM.
- Cloud IAM roles in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud let a workload reach other resources.
- CI/CD pipeline credentials, SSH keys, and TLS certificates secure connections between machines.
- AI agents call APIs and act on their own. This is the newest and fastest-growing type.
You will also hear the term machine identity. It means almost the same thing. “Machine identity” usually points to devices and workloads. “Non-human identity” is the wider term that also covers software links and AI agents. For planning, treat them as one problem.
Why Are Non-Human Identities Growing So Fast?
NHIs are not new. What changed is how fast they multiply. Three shifts caused it.
First, the cloud broke apps into small pieces. Old apps were one big block of code. Modern apps are split into many small services. Each service needs its own identity to talk to the others. With containers and Kubernetes, these services start and stop all the time. One app can create and drop hundreds of short-lived identities in a single day.
Second, automation makes identities faster than people can. Every pipeline, every integration, and every setup script can create new credentials by itself. Some NHIs even create other NHIs.
Third, and the biggest one for 2026, AI agents added fuel to the fire. Agents do more than answer questions now. They take actions, call APIs, and reach sensitive systems. Each agent is a new identity that needs credentials. To see the scale, Microsoft reported that customers created over one million custom AI agents across SharePoint and Copilot Studio in a single quarter.
There is one more twist. Agents are often provisioned with delegated human credentials so they can act on a person’s behalf. That makes it hard to tell who really did something. Gartner expects this gap between machines and humans to keep growing. The simple way to put it: machines create identities at software speed, but we still manage them at human speed.
The Real Problem: The Governance Gap
Here is the core issue. Identity tools were built for people. NHIs do not act like people. That mismatch causes three problems.
First, human controls do not work on machines. MFA asks for a phone or a fingerprint. A service account has neither. SSO and HR onboarding are built for employees, not API keys. So NHIs slip right past our best defenses.
Second, no one has a full list. Most companies cannot point to a single list of every service account, token, key, and certificate. Each platform keeps its own. So, identities get orphaned. The employee who set it up moves on, or the project wraps up, but the credential keeps working with full access and no owner.
Third, permissions pile up. NHIs are usually granted too much access the moment they are created, because broad access is easier to set up. No one reviews it later. In fact, machine identities often have more access to sensitive data than people do. Yet 88 percent of organizations still treat only human accounts as “privileged.”
What Are the Biggest Non-Human Identity Risks?
These risks can feel abstract, so it helps to see them organized and ranked. In 2025, OWASP published its Non-Human Identities Top 10. It ranks the biggest NHI risks, so you know where to look first.
The number one risk is Improper Offboarding, which is the orphaned-credential problem described earlier in the governance gap section. The rest of the list covers Secret Leakage, Vulnerable Third-Party NHI, Insecure Authentication, Overprivileged NHI, Insecure Cloud Deployment Configurations, Long-Lived Secrets, Environment Isolation, NHI Reuse, and Human Use of NHI.
Look closely and you see a pattern. Almost everything comes back to three bad habits: secrets that live too long, too much privilege, and no clean way to retire an identity. Fix those three and you handle most of the list.
How to Secure NHIs
The fix is not complicated. The whole idea is simple. Stop treating credentials as permanent secrets. Instead, treat each workload as an identity you can check, limit, and expire. Here is what that looks like in practice.
Begin with full discovery, running continuous scans across your cloud, SaaS, and on-premises systems so nothing slips through unnoticed. Record every NHI in a single living inventory and give each one a named owner who is responsible for it.
Grant each NHI only the access it genuinely needs, limiting it to the single job it was created for. When permissions are kept that tight, a stolen credential causes far less damage.
Replace long-lived secrets with short-lived ones, which is the single biggest improvement you can make here. An open standard called SPIFFE, with its tool SPIRE, gives each workload a short-lived ID document (SVID). It comes as an X.509 certificate or a JWT, and it rotates on its own, often every hour by default. So, stolen ones are useless almost right away.
Rely on just-in-time access so that permissions are handed out for a single task and withdrawn the moment it completes. Nothing lingers afterwards, which removes the idle access that attackers so often exploit.
Monitor the behavior of your identities continuously, since unusual activity is often the first sign of a compromised account. Then decommission each identity with unusual activity as soon as its service is removed, leaving no orphaned credentials behind.
Why This Matters Right Now
Two things make this a 2026 problem, not a someday problem.
First, AI agents are already a target. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 25 percent of enterprise breaches will trace back to AI agent abuse. Every agent is an NHI. So securing machine identities is how you safely use the AI tools your business already wants.
Second, certificates are getting shorter, and certificates are machine identities too. As of March 15, 2026, a public TLS certificate can live for only 200 days, down from 398. It drops to 100 days in 2027 and 47 days in 2029. That means many more renewals. Tracking them by hand will cause outages. This rule is for public TLS certificates. Internal PKI sets its own limits, but the push to automate is the same.
The good news is that trusted standards already agree. NIST SP 800-207, ‘Zero Trust Architecture’, says to verify every request and to count machine identities, not just people. Its follow-up SP 800-207A, ‘A Zero Trust Architecture Model for Access Control in Cloud-Native Applications in Multi-Cloud Environments’ even names SPIFFE, the open standard, introduced earlier, that gives each workload its own short-lived, verifiable identity. On the compliance side, PCI DSS 4.0, now fully enforceable since March 2025 under Requirements 8.6.1 to 8.6.3, expects you to tightly manage application and system accounts, eliminate hard-coded passwords, and protect service account credentials from misuse.
Meeting all of this in practice and on your own is the real challenge, and this is exactly where Encryption Consulting can help.
How Encryption Consulting Can Help
Certificates are the machine identities most of us already depend on, and they are exactly the ones now exploding in number and shrinking in lifespan. So, this is the best place to start. That is where Encryption Consulting’s CertSecure Manager comes in. It is a certificate lifecycle management tool, and it follows the same playbook this guide describes, just applied to certificates.
CertSecure Manager finds every certificate across your cloud, on-premises, and hybrid systems, and puts them in one central inventory with a clear owner for each. It then renews them on its own, with zero-touch renewals, so a certificate never expires by surprise and takes a service down. It enforces policy and least privilege, so each team only manages its own certificates and only approved algorithms are used. And it keeps full audit trails, which makes compliance reviews far easier.
This matters most right now because of those shorter certificate lifespans. When certificates renew far more often, tracking them by hand simply breaks. CertSecure Manager handles that renewal load for you, so the change becomes a non-event instead of a fire drill.
And if you want to step back and look at the bigger picture, Encryption Consulting also offers Encryption Advisory Services. The team can assess where you stand today and help shape a clear strategy and roadmap, so your entire machine identity and encryption program moves forward together. CertSecure Manager helps you in certificate lifecycle management, and Encryption Advisory Services shapes the broader strategy around it. For teams deploying AI agents, Encryption Consulting issues short-lived certificates to every agent and automates their lifecycle.
Conclusion
Non-human identities are now the biggest group in your environment, and AI agents are speeding that up. The core problem is simple to state. Our tools were built for people, so they cannot see or control machines. That is the governance gap.
The takeaways are easy to remember. NHIs far outnumber humans, and most are unmanaged and over-permissioned. Human controls like MFA and SSO do not work on them, which is why attackers love them. The fix is to find them, limit their access, use short-lived credentials, grant access just in time, and retire them cleanly.
Companies that win in 2026 will build identity into every workload and agent from the start, not after a breach. If you want to map your machine identities and build a foundation that scales, we can help you take that first step.
