Non-Human Identities (NHIs) are deeply embedded in modern IT and SDLC ecosystems, facilitating automation, cloud ops, and machine to machine (M2M) integrations. According to the 2025 State of NHI and Secrets report, 90% of NHI tokens have excessive permissions, and 44% of tokens are exposed in the wild. This is a critical security gap, NHIs are often provisioned by developers with far more privileges than necessary for their intended functions and lack proper oversight or governance. Estimates suggest there are up to 5 times more highly privileged NHIs than highly privileged human identities, these over-permissioned NHIs represent one of the most dangerous yet overlooked threats in modern organizations.
Unlike human users, which ideally can be managed under strict IAM policies, NHIs are often left with broad, unrestricted access across environments, databases, and microservices. A single compromised “Super NHI” can give attackers the ability to escalate privileges, move laterally, and access sensitive systems without detection. The problem extends, as most organizations lack the basic ability to properly govern NHIs and their secrets, leaving them unable to track which ones exist, what permissions they hold, or who is the human responsible for managing them.
In this second installment of our Entro Labs NHI Threats & Mitigation series, we’ll cover:
- The risks of super NHIs: how NHIs with excessive permissions become high-risk targets.
- The IAM/governance gaps: why lack of visibility and control around NHIs leads to critical CloudSec and AppSec blind spots.
- Mitigation strategies: how security teams can rein in over-permissioned NHIs and enforce least privilege access with the right controls.
By the end of this blog, you’ll have a clear roadmap for better securing your NHIs, mitigating the “privilege inflation”, and reducing the risk of a major breach across your cloud and application environments.
Enterprise Security for AI Agents & Non-Human Identities
Super, But Not For The Right Reasons – NHIs & Privilege Inflation
Microsoft defines “super identities” as identities, both human and non-human, that possess the highest privilege permissions within an authorization system. This includes users, service accounts, and serverless functions. Building upon this concept, we introduce the term “Super NHIs” to specifically describe NHIs that have been provisioned with elevated privileges far beyond their necessary operational scope – as many NHI actually (and unnecessarily) admin-level. These elevated privileges dramatically widen the attack surface, making Super NHIs prime targets for exploitation.
Description
NHIs are foundational to IT and DevOps environments, enabling system integrations, communication over APIs, and routine administrative functions. Ideally, they should be granted specific, minimal permissions – so they can access and take action on only the databases, servers, or cloud resources necessary for their tasks. In reality however, in many organizations this is not the case, NHIs are routinely provisioned/created with much more permissions than needed.
For example:
- A CSP service account used by one application may be given administrator-level access across multiple systems when it only needs to interact with a specific service or dataset.
- An API key might be configured with full read/write access to all databases, rather than being restricted to a specific DB.
This situation is a clear violation of the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP), which dictates that each NHI should only be granted the minimum permissions necessary to perform its tasks. Super NHIs not only expand the scope of potential damage in the event of a compromise but also make detection and containment more difficult.
Governance Gap: Lack of NHI Access Management
While Super NHIs pose an immediate risk due to their excessive permissions, the root cause often lies in a deeper, systemic issue: the lack of effective Non-Human Identity Access Management (NHIAM).
More and more organizations adopt Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solutions to govern their human identities, these tools are designed to enforce policies, manage access rights, and track user activity. However, IGA solutions often fail to deliver the same robustness for NHIs. Unlike human identities, NHIs operate autonomously, sometimes ephemerally, at scale and with unique access patterns that traditional IGA and IAM frameworks weren’t built to handle.
Without proper governance, Super NHIs don’t just widen the attack surface – they multiply the potential for devastating breaches. In the next section, we’ll dive into the impact and dangers over-privileged NHIs that are left unmonitored pose to your cloud and application environments.
The Ungoverned Threats of Over-Permissioned NHIs
When compromised, Super NHIs can provide attackers with unrestricted access, opening doors to sensitive data, critical systems, and long-term, undetected breaches, over-privileged NHIs allow threat actors to:
- Move Laterally: an external attacker or malicious insider can leverage an over-permissioned NHI to navigate across your network, accessing interconnected systems and services that also lack proper restrictions.
- Escalate Privileges: NHIs with broad access often hold the keys to administrative tools, configuration files, and sensitive resources. Attackers can use these to elevate privileges even further, gaining deeper control over your environment.
- Create Persistent Backdoors: once inside, attackers can modify configurations, install malware, or create additional NHIs or service accounts to maintain long-term, covert access, even after the initial breach was detected.
Granting excessive permissions to NHIs can have serious, far-reaching repercussions for your overall security posture. Without proper governance and IAM controls around NHIs, organizations are exposed to:
Unauthorized Actions & System Manipulation
Attackers can use compromised NHIs to modify system configurations, disable security controls, exfiltrate data, or even deploy malicious software across multiple systems. Potential consequences may include:
- Disabling defenses, leaving systems vulnerable to further attacks.
- Deleting or leaking sensitive data without triggering alerts.
- Deploying ransomware or malware that spreads rapidly due to broad NHI permissions.
Service Disruptions & Operational Downtime
Over-permissioned NHIs often have access to critical systems and automation workflows. When compromised, attackers can disrupt operations, causing downtime that impacts both internal teams and customer-facing services. For example.if an automation service responsible for orchestrating cloud deployments is compromised, attackers could halt service delivery, leading to widespread chaos and severe financial losses.
Undetected & Persistent Attacks
NHIs with broad permissions are often harder to monitor than human identities. Their automated, background operations can allow attackers to blend in, making malicious activity difficult to detect as:
- NHIs often bypass traditional monitoring tools, operating in areas not designed for identity-based logging.
- Attackers can maintain long-term access by creating persistent backdoors, modifying NHIs, or generating new machine identities that go unnoticed.
Inefficient Incident Response & Delayed Recovery
Without clear visibility and governance into NHI behavior and permissions, security teams struggle to isolate breaches. When NHIs and human identities share overlapping access controls, it becomes even more complex to pinpoint the source of compromise. As a result, delayed breach detection allows attackers to remain undetected longer and the slower remediation increases the impact.
The risks associated with Super NHIs aren’t theoretical – they’re active vulnerabilities in cloud and application environments. To prevent privilege inflation and contain potential breaches, organizations must adopt proactive strategies for NHI governance, access control, and real-time monitoring. In the next section, we’ll outline key mitigation tactics to rein in over-permissioned NHIs and secure your infrastructure.
Mitigation Strategies: Right-Sizing Super NHIs
Over-permissioned NHIs don’t have to be a ticking time bomb. By enforcing strict access controls, monitoring behaviors in real-time, and implementing lifecycle governance, organizations can rein in Super NHIs and fortify their security posture. Here are some best practices and recommendations.
Enforce the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)
PoLP should be the cornerstone of NHI security. Each Non-Human Identity should only have the permissions essential for its role: no more, no less.
Granular Access Controls
Implement role-based access controls (RBAC) or attribute-based access controls (ABAC) to tailor permissions to the NHI’s specific tasks. Avoid blanket permissions that give NHIs unnecessary access to sensitive systems.
Dynamic Permissions Management
Automate the granting and revocation of permissions based on the NHI’s lifecycle and role changes.
Entro’s platform provides granular visibility into NHI permissions across apps and cloud environments, highlighting unnecessary or unused access rights. In this example, an AWS token has excessive permissions – including unused “write” privileges for STS and “list” permissions for ECR. By identifying and flagging these over-permissioned NHIs, Entro enables security teams to enforce least privilege principles and minimize risk exposure.
Regularly Audit Permissions & NHI Activities
Permissions should never be a “set it and forget it” scenario. Regular audits ensure NHIs don’t accumulate excessive access over time.
Periodic Permission Reviews
Conduct regular audits of NHI permissions, especially after system updates or when employees leave the organization.
Track Permission Changes
Maintain detailed logs of when permissions were granted, modified, or revoked to ensure accountability.
With detailed NHI lineage maps Entro provides security teams with clear, visual breakdowns of NHI permissions, usage, and access paths across different cloud services.
Monitor NHI Behavior for Anomalies
Even the most restrictive permissions can’t stop a compromised NHI from wreaking havoc if it goes unnoticed. Behavior monitoring is essential to catch threats in real-time.
Baseline Behavior Profiling
Use machine learning or behavior analytics to establish normal activity patterns for each NHI. Any deviation, like accessing an unusual system or logging in from an unexpected location, should trigger alerts.
Real-Time Alerts & Responses
Set up automated alerts for suspicious behaviors like privilege escalation, unauthorized data access, or lateral movement within the network.
Entro’s NHIDR continuously monitors NHI behavior for anomalies to detect unusual access patterns, privilege escalations, and abnormal secret activity. Anomalies such as token misuse, vault dumps, and suspicious secret exposures are flagged in real time, enabling rapid remediation and response to threats before they escalate.
Leverage Centralized NHI Governance
A fragmented approach to NHI management leaves too many blind spots. Centralizing governance gives organizations complete control and visibility over all NHIs.
Unified NHI Inventory
Maintain a single, comprehensive inventory of all NHIs, including their permissions, ownership, and activity patterns.
Assign Clear Ownership
Every NHI should have an assigned human owner responsible for its security and compliance.
Entro offers centralized NHI governance capabilities, including a comprehensive inventory of employees and human owners responsible for NHIs and their associated secrets. This visibility ensures accountability, making it easier to manage permissions, detect anomalies, and enforce compliance, while reducing risks linked to unmanaged or orphaned NHIs
Stay Ahead of Non-Human Identities Threats
Super NHIs pose a silent but significant threat to your organization’s security. By enforcing least privilege, implementing robust lifecycle management, and leveraging real-time monitoring, organizations can reduce the risk of privilege inflation and prevent catastrophic breaches.
Entro’s platform empowers security teams to take control of their NHI ecosystem, offering unparalleled visibility, governance, and protection for one of today’s most overlooked threats. If you want to learn more about how Entro helps dozens of CISOs and security teams mitigate NHI threats, detect leaked secrets in real time, and secure the machine identity attack surface, reach out to us for a free assessment.
