Securing NHIs with Coralogix

Non-Human Identities (NHIs) refer to digital identities assigned to machines, applications, services, APIs, containers, bots, and other automated or programmatic entities within an IT or cloud environment. 

Unlike user accounts that are tied to real people, NHIs enable systems to communicate and perform actions on each other’s behalf, such as a microservice querying a database or a CI/CD pipeline deploying code. These identities are typically associated with credentials like API keys, tokens, certificates, or SSH keys, which grant them access to systems resources and data.

NHI’s often hold elevated permissions and can access sensitive data or critical infrastructure components. If left unmanaged or unsecured, they increase the attack surface exponentially. Unlike human users, NHIs don’t often follow predictable work hours or behaviors, which makes them harder to baseline and analyze without proper controls. 

Securing and monitoring NHIs ensures that only authorized systems can interact, access, or make changes within the environment — a crucial aspect of maintaining security, compliance, and system authenticity and integrity.

The number of NHIs has exploded with the rise of cloud-native architectures, DevOps automation, and AI workloads. In many organizations, NHIs outnumber human users tens or hundreds of times. Unfortunately, traditional identity and access management (IAM) systems were not designed to handle this scale or complexity. Meanwhile, attackers are increasingly targeting these identities because they are often poorly monitored, hard-coded into scripts, or left with excessive privileges which makes the urgency to act now driven by the increasing complexity of modern infrastructure and the growing volume of automated, machine-based communication.

Failure to secure and monitor NHIs can lead to a wide range of security incidents, including:

• Credential Leakage: Hard-coded credentials or exposed tokens in public repositories can be exploited by attackers.
• Lateral Movement: Once a malicious actor compromises one NHI, they can potentially pivot across systems using that identity’s access.
• Privilege Escalation: Overprivileged NHIs can be abused to execute unauthorized actions or gain access to sensitive systems.
• Data Exfiltration: Compromised NHIs can be used to silently extract large volumes of data without triggering traditional user-based alerts.
• Supply Chain Attacks: NHIs involved in a build pipeline process or software distribution can be hijacked to inject malicious code or backdoors.
  
  
  

NHI’s come in various forms, depending on the systems, environments, and tasks they are associated with. Common types include service accounts, which are used by applications or scripts to perform automated tasks; API keys and tokens, which grant access to cloud services or APIs; robots and bots, such as chatbots or automation bots used in IT workflows; IoT devices, which connect to networks and systems often with their own identity and authentication needs; and machine credentials, including SSH keys and certificates used for secure communication between servers or services. In cloud environments, NHIs also include IAM roles and managed identities, which allow cloud-native services like virtual machines or containers to interact securely with other components. As digital infrastructure evolves, the number and variety of NHIs continue to grow, making their visibility and management a top security priority.

Coralogix is getting ahead of the game by concentrating on NHI factors, such as : 

• Inventory Management – Discover and inventories NHI’s with visibility into usage and access privileges.

• Context – context about each identity – ownership, usage, resource access, privileged status and stale accounts. 

• Proactive Security – Continuously analyse and improve the security of non-human identities, trigger alerts and visualize activity through the custom dashboards.

• Integration – Integrating with Azure, GCP, AWS and Okta cloud
  
  
  

As the digital ecosystem continues to expand, the presence of non-human identities—ranging from bots and APIs to autonomous systems—has become foundational to modern infrastructure. Ensuring their security and effective monitoring is not optional; it’s critical. Without proper safeguards, these identities can be exploited, leading to breaches, service disruptions, and loss of trust. Just as human identity management evolved to meet growing digital demands, securing non-human identities must become a top priority to protect data integrity, ensure compliance, and enable seamless, secure automation across industries.