Machine PAM: What It Is and Why It Matters

Machine PAM refers to the application of privileged access management (PAM) principles and technologies to non-human identities, machine accounts, services, applications, containers, and automation scripts. Some common areas encompassed within Machine PAM include, but are not limited to:

• Service accounts: A type of non-person account used by applications and computer systems to perform automated tasks and access resources, like data and systems, without human intervention.

• APIs: An Application Programming Interface (API) is a way for different software applications to communicate and exchange data

• Robotic processes: More formally known as robotic process automation (RPA), refers to using software robots to automate repetitive, rules-based, and systematic business tasks that humans typically perform, such as data entry or processing invoices.

• IoT devices: An Internet of Things (IoT) device is a physical object, such as a sensor, appliance, or machine, embedded with software and network connectivity that allows it to collect and exchange data with other devices and systems, either over the internet or a similar network.

• Agentic AI systems: These are autonomous artificial intelligence entities involving AI agents, which are designed to act independently. Agentic AI makes contextual decisions, adapting to dynamic environments, and performing complex tasks and automation, without constant human oversight, to achieve pre-determined goals (see a real-world attack scenario involving enterprise AI agents)

While machine / non-human entities often require elevated privileges to function, they are frequently overlooked in secure-by-design initiatives and risk assessments due to poor visibility into their implementations. The emerging term and discipline of Machine PAM formalized the technology management of these identities and accounts. This includes:

• Finding and onboarding machine identities. This includes discovery, documenting ownership, and lifecycle management.

• Providing a process to vault, rotate / generate, and audit their secrets, including providing just-in-time (JIT) access.

• Hardening these identities, including enforcing least privilege, access control lists, and implementing architectures like zero trust.

• Providing oversight of their activity, such as via monitoring and session auditing, and potential indicators of compromise (IoC).

As machine-to-machine communication dominates modern infrastructure (cloud, DevOps, microservices), securing machine identities becomes as critical as managing user credentials / secrets to prevent lateral movement, service compromise, and shadow IT. And thanks to this new term, we can call the machine-focused version of PAM what it is with a lot more precision and strategic focus.

Machine PAM is a crucial facet of modern identity security because, when left unsecured, machine identities and their associated accounts can lead to myriad attack vectors. And with, for example, workload identities alone outnumbering human identities at an average of 10:1, they represent a significant part of today’s identity attack surface.

Machine identities are prone to common identity security challenges, such as over-entitlement / excessive privileges and standing access, but they also pose several unique challenges in comparison to human identities.

Examples of attack vectors specific to machine identities include:

• Greater proliferation of shadow identities and non-human accounts.

• Lack of clarity around who the original owner of the machine identity was / is or what the purpose of the identity was / is.

• Less defined (or nonexistent) lifecycle controls, especially when trying to identify stale or long standing dormant accounts.

• Lack of security controls that are commonly seen for human identities, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), simply because they do not exist for machine accounts.

• Credential leakage in code repositories that could lead to source code theft or compromise of workflows.

• Hardcoded tokens and other secrets in scripts being exposed or compromised during runtime that could expose data or resources.

• Inability to rotate machine credentials at scale due to an incident, personnel changes, or even periodically based on policies and best practices.

Over the course of conducting identity security risk assessments across a variety of environments, BeyondTrust Phantom Labs™ has uncovered numerous findings related to machine identities and privileged access management. For instance, the team reported finding dormant service accounts with privilege in over 70% of environments. They also uncovered several credentials that had been used across multiple service accounts, meaning that the associated accounts were more vulnerable to threats like password spray attacks.

Along the same vein, nearly half (46.4%) of security alerts that Google observed in Google Cloud during H2 2024 were due to overprivileged service accounts. These real-world findings shed light on how insecure machine identities are in many of today’s environments, and why Machine PAM is more imperative than ever.

While the specific terminology for Machine PAM is new, we’ve had a toolbox of cybersecurity best practices for managing machine identities, and should continue to follow and mature these strategies.

Some essential Machine PAM best practices include:

• Discover machine identities across your environment (you can get started with BeyondTrust’s complimentary Identity Security Risk Assessment)

• Vaulting credentials and secrets in a PAM solution, such as BeyondTrust’s Password Safe for both human and machine identities.

• Rotating passwords or keys automatically, or generating dynamic secrets, based on documented policies (BeyondTrust Password Safe)

• Using  just-in-time access for machine and secrets workflows, such as with a solution like BeyondTrust Entitle

• Auditing and monitoring access behavior for anomalies using an ITDR (Identity Threat Detection and Response) solution, such as capabilities unlocked from the unified BeyondTrust Pathfinder Platform.

If you’re hearing about Machine PAM for the first time and thinking it sounds similar to how mature organizations already embrace PAM in general, you’re absolutely right. It might be a new buzzword, but “Machine PAM” underpins problems and solutions we’ve been thinking about for a while now.

The biggest takeaway is a significant reminder to cover your machine identities with PAM, too.

Learn more about what it looks like to mature your entire approach to privileged access management, including both human and non-human identities, with our PAM Maturity Model Guide.