The cybersecurity community has been buzzing about the growing importance of machine or non-human identity security. We won’t get into the naming debate today. Instead, let’s discuss how they’re managed and protected. Non-human identities (NHIs) or machine identities are doorways into your critical systems and applications. They usually exist without as much scrutiny and oversight as your human identities receive. These are rapidly outnumbering the human identities and rapidly expanding your attack surface. Gartner says they are outnumbering humans by 10 to 45 times.
NHIs encompass API keys, OAuth tokens, service accounts, service principals, and cryptographic keys. These are all crucial in automating tasks and enhancing business efficiencies. However, with their growing presence, they’re also expanding your attack surface, becoming prime targets for malicious actors.
We’ve seen instances of this in recent attacks – Midnight Blizzard, Okta, and Uber – just to name a few. In each of these examples, NHIs opened the door to lateral movement made possible by undetected machine identity credential exposure. We’ve seen the risks created firsthand when NHIs are managed separately. This separation can lead to critical vulnerabilities, giving attackers more opportunities to exploit systems.
Human and non-human identity security – all together now
It’s best to seek a unified approach to identity security encompassing human and non-human identities. Here are three strong reasons why:
- It’s a bi-directional relationship: Humans and NHIs are deeply interconnected. Humans use NHIs, such as keys and tokens, either directly or via scripts and code, to automate processes, access APIs, and manage infrastructure. NHIs enable secure, efficient interaction with various services, allowing deployment, data transfer, and authentication tasks to occur without human intervention.
In some less-than-ideal practices, machines use human identities to impersonate users, perform actions on their behalf, or for audit purposes. This two-way relationship means that protecting one without the other is ineffective. Essentially, this creates potential security gaps and complicates tracking and accountability.
- Humans manage and control NHIs: Humans administer privileges and make configuration changes that affect NHI behavior. Understanding and securing these changes is crucial because any alteration in NHI privileges can have significant security implications. Having an end-to-end view of all risks, entitlements, privileges, and activities from human to machine eliminates risk. It proactively prevents breaches, policy violations, and misconfigurations, closing gaps that attackers exploit for entry.
- Manual coordination pitfalls slow you down: Attackers are known to move laterally between human and non-human identities, as demonstrated in high-profile incidents like the Midnight Blizzard, MGM, and Uber attacks. The speed with which they traverse across systems is much faster than you can imagine and much more difficult to spot and stop without a unified view of an NHI’s human identity owner’s privileges and entitlements. Fragmenting security efforts into separate streams for NHIs and human identities creates an environment that favors attackers.
When defenders have to manually coordinate between different tools and teams to respond to threats involving both human and non-human identities, it gives attackers an advantage.
A formula that favors attackers
In security, 1 (the attacker) is greater than 2 (team members). The formula favors the attacker because they can move faster while the multiple team members must coordinate and mutually agree to act. This coordination takes time—time that defenders cannot afford to lose. A unified approach with a single system that monitors and protects both human and non-human identities can significantly reduce response times and improve defense efficacy.
By unifying non-human identity security and human identity security, you can gain comprehensive visibility into all access points, reducing the chances of missing critical security events. This unified approach enables faster preventative and responsive actions, ensuring that attackers cannot exploit the gaps created by separate identity protection streams.
Prevent non-human identity access blind spots
Deciding to separate non-human identity security and human identity protection inherently creates blind spots. These blind spots can lead to delays in risk visibility and threat detection, giving adversaries an upper hand.
The traditional boundaries between human and non-human identities are increasingly blurring, and as cyber threats evolve, our approach to identity security must also evolve.
At Rezonate, we offer a unified identity-centric security platform offering discovery, visibility, monitoring, and actionable capabilities, including access reviews, posture management, and ITDR, for human and non-human identities (NHIs).
Organizations looking to bolster their identity security efforts should consider vendors who offer this unified approach, ensuring complete visibility and control over all identities—human or non-human. By doing so, they can minimize their attack surface and enhance their overall security posture in an ever-evolving threat landscape.
Learn more about Rezonate’s Non-Human Identity security solution.
