A non-human identity (NHI) is any digital credential or authentication entity that operates without direct human control, including service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, machine certificates, and the credentials used by automated systems, bots, and AI agents to authenticate to other services. Managing and securing NHIs has become a critical and often overlooked dimension of identity security as the ratio of machine-to-human identities in modern software environments has grown dramatically.

What is a non-human identity?

A non-human identity (NHI) is any authentication credential or identity entity that belongs to a machine, application, or automated process rather than a person. This includes API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens, machine certificates, SSH keys, database credentials, and the credentials used by CI/CD pipelines, cloud functions, containers, and AI agents to call other services.

As NIST's Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 notes, non-person entities must be governed as "first-class identities," subject to the same verification, policy enforcement, and visibility controls applied to human users. In practice, most organizations have done the opposite. Human identity governance has matured considerably over the past decade; NHI governance is still catching up.

The scale of the gap is notable. According to research published by the NHI Management Group, NHIs now outnumber human identities in the average enterprise at a ratio of 144 to 1, a significant jump from 92 to 1 in 2024. The number of NHIs in the average enterprise grew by 44% between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2025. For a startup with 50 engineers, that implies thousands of machine credentials scattered across AWS roles, GitHub Actions secrets, third-party SaaS integrations, and internal microservices.

Types of non-human identities

Understanding the NHI landscape starts with knowing what forms these identities take.

API keys and tokens

API keys are static string credentials that grant access to an external service. They're the most common NHI type and the most commonly mishandled. API keys end up hardcoded in source code, checked into repositories, logged in CI/CD output, and shared via Slack. Once exposed, they provide access until manually rotated.

OAuth tokens are similar but typically short-lived and scoped to specific permissions. They're commonly used for application-to-application integrations and service-to-service calls. OAuth access tokens that are improperly stored or that grant excessive permissions represent a meaningful risk surface.

Service accounts

A service account is an account created to represent a process or application rather than a person. In cloud environments, service accounts are used by virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions to authenticate to other services. In SaaS platforms, they enable programmatic access via the product's API. Service accounts frequently accumulate permissions over time and rarely get deprovisioned when they're no longer needed.

Machine certificates

Machine certificates, including TLS client certificates and SSH keys, authenticate servers, containers, and network devices to each other. Certificate management at scale requires automated rotation and monitoring for expiry, since an expired certificate can take down a service and an untracked certificate represents an access control gap.

CI/CD pipeline credentials

Build and deployment pipelines require credentials to access source code repositories, push container images, and deploy to cloud environments. These credentials often carry elevated privileges and are stored as pipeline environment variables, which can be exposed through logging or pipeline poisoning attacks.

Why NHI security matters for startups

  1. The majority of identity-related breaches now involve NHIs. According to the Cloud Security Alliance's research, 80% of identity-related breaches involve compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys. These credentials are targeted because they're often over-privileged, long-lived, and never reviewed.
  2. Over-provisioning is the default, not the exception. Research from the NHI Management Group found that 97% of NHIs have excessive privileges. When a CI/CD pipeline needs to push a Docker image, it often gets credentials with far broader cloud access than required. These excess permissions sit dormant until an attacker compromises the credential and finds they can do much more than expected.
  3. NHIs are almost never deprovisioned. Unlike human employee accounts, which are typically offboarded when someone leaves, NHI credentials frequently outlive the service or integration they were created for. Audit reviews of NHI inventories at startups regularly surface API keys created years ago for projects that were abandoned, connected to systems that no longer exist, still carrying valid access.
  4. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 require you to account for them. User access reviews, a SOC 2 control requirement, are typically interpreted to include service accounts and machine credentials, not just human users. ISO 27001 Annex A control 5.15 (access control) and 8.2 (privileged access rights) explicitly cover non-person accounts. If you're approaching a compliance audit, your NHI inventory is part of the scope.

NHIs and the rise of AI agents

Agentic AI systems are rapidly expanding the NHI surface area. When you deploy an AI coding assistant, an automated security scanner, or a workflow automation tool, each creates new NHI credentials with access to your code, cloud environment, and internal systems. Unlike traditional service accounts, AI agents may request dynamic permissions at runtime, making static access reviews insufficient. The NHI governance question for 2025 and beyond is not just "what machine credentials do we have?" but "what can each of our AI agents access and do on our behalf?"

How Fencer helps with non-human identity security

Fencer's identity and access security features include automated user access reviews that cover service accounts and non-human credentials alongside human users, giving teams a consolidated view of who and what has access to which systems. Fencer's continuous scanning surfaces exposed secrets and credentials across code repositories and CI/CD configurations before they can be exploited, and its cloud security posture management checks flag over-permissioned service accounts and IAM roles against least-privilege baselines. For teams preparing for SOC 2 or ISO 27001, Fencer auto-generates the access review evidence that auditors require.