Machine Identity Management

Common Machine Identity Security Risks

While machine identities—also known as non-human identities (NHIs)—are prone to common identity security challenges, such as over-entitlement, standing privileges, and orphaned accounts (BeyondTrust Phantom Labs ™ uncovered dormant service accounts with privilege in 70% of environments) they also pose unique risks compared to human identities. These risks are further abstracted in DevOps, CI / CD pipelines, and Kubernetes-based environments, where machine identities and M2M communications play a central part.

Explosive sprawl

Machine identities (application accounts, software robots, AI agents, etc.) are estimated to now outnumber human ones by as much as 80:1¹, making discovery, inventory, and management at scale a challenge.

Immature lifecycle controls

Machine identities and accounts may be created by various teams operating in silos. Without the right tools, IT is largely blind to these accounts, including their actions and security risks.

Secrets exposure

Inadequately managed secrets, keys, passwords, tokens, API credentials, and certificates can enable attackers to hijack machine identities (often embedded in code in plaintext, or visible on the workload).

Excessive privilege

Not only are machine identities over-entitled for what they need to accomplish, but they frequently have standing (24/7) access, bloating the threat windows and attack surface.

Uptime concerns stall hygiene

Because they’re deeply automated, teams hesitate to automatically rotate credentials, fearing disruptions, or even catastrophic outages.

Siloed toolsets

Existing toolsets provide piecemeal visibility and management, but leave critical security gaps and don’t scale with the size and dynamism of the machine identity landscape.

¹ SASE/SSE Platforms Must Adapt to Secure the Rise of Agentic AI and (NHI) Non-Human Identity Access. Gartner. By Charanpal Bhogal, Charlie Winckless, Neil MacDonald, & John Watts. December 2025.

Explore how to gain unrivaled visibility and governance over agentic AI.

Extend Identity-First Security to DevOps & Modern Application Environments

BeyondTrust converges privileged access management (PAM), secrets management, and threat detection and response all within our unified Pathfinder Platform to ensure machine identities—such as those used by containers, cloud workloads, service accounts, and AI agents—are actively managed and secured alongside human ones.

Machine Identity Management Use Cases

Centralize identity visibility

Gain continuous, cross-domain visibility into identities, accounts, privileges, entitlements, and escalation paths. Use AI to visualize attack paths, contextualize risk, and guide remediation.

Harden machine Identities

Discover, control, and audit machine identities. Eliminate hardcoded credentials, vault and secure secrets and keys, and remove unnecessary privileges from machine accounts, applications, and systems.

Secure at machine speed

Secure privileged access for automation at machine speed, enabling teams to operate at peak velocity across DevOps, RPA, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Terraform, etc.

“Trying to change passwords on a service account used to be a nightmare. People don’t always remember where passwords are, and changing them could break things and create big headaches for many people. Password Safe would make the whole process more efficient, eliminating the need for duplicate work, easing collaboration between departments, and helping decrease audit findings."

—David Lokke, Senior Systems Administrator, Premier Bankcard

"Our workflows were highly inefficient and there was a lot of friction and frustration. But BeyondTrust changed that with Identity Security Insights, and we are able to tailor our alert settings. This way, it significantly reduces unnecessary alerts. There's more accurate threat detection which reduces our false positive rate and Insights, powered by AI and Machine Learning, adapts to my inputs."

—Anna Essex, Sr Security Analyst, Polsinelli

“[Password Safe] now provides comprehensive identity security capabilities across the company. Security has been further strengthened by bifurcating user access rights. This means that if access to one application is compromised, it does not allow an attacker to gain access to other applications. The result is higher resilience and greater protection of assets.”

—Mateen Sayyed, Regional Head of Identity & Access Management, Ninja Van Group

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Privileged Governance Across Your Entire Identity Estate

Understand Machine Identity Risk

Identity Security Insights centralizes visibility and intelligence of identities, privileges, entitlements, and escalation paths for humans and machines, across domains.

Discovers and analyzes all identities and their risks, including for service accounts, scripts, API keys, AI agents, orphaned and shadow accounts, and more.
Contextualizes risk by correlating and risk scoring identity data across cloud, SaaS, IdP, and on-premises sources.
Applies the AI-powered True Privilege™ Graph to reveal how machine and workload identities hold direct privileges, or have pathways to elevated access.
Detects anomalous or excessive privileges tied to non-human identities and provides actionable remediation guidance.
Operationalizes ITDR via Integration with BeyondTrust PAM products and third-party toolsets, to convert insight into action.

Manage Machine Accounts & Credentials

Password Safe is a powerful solution to manage privileged accounts, passwords, secrets, SSH keys, and sessions for everything.

Discovers, onboards, and profiles all known and unknown assets (web, mobile, cloud, virtual), privileged user accounts, shared accounts, service accounts, and other NHI accounts used in automation / RPA tasks.
Auto-categorize, groups, assesses, and reports on assets by IP range, naming convention, OS, domain, applications, business function, Active Directory, etc.
Removes hard-coded passwords / secrets from applications and scripts using an extensible REST interface that supports many languages, including C/C++, Perl, .NET, and Java.
Rotates passwords, keys, and secrets—enabling auto-reset after machine usage—via timers, and even programmatically.
Enables secure DevOps workflows with API-driven automation and integrations for CI/CD, RPA, and orchestration tools, improving developer efficiency.

Right-size Permissions for Machines and Workloads in the Cloud

Entitle manages cloud permissions, including those cloud-native permissions machines may possess.

Removes or reduces standing privileges, enforcing a just-in-time access model wherever feasible, to reduce threat windows and the blast radius of attacks.
Applies cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) capabilities, which are essential for machines to securely interact with cloud resources.

Apply Least Privilege across Applications and Endpoints

Endpoint Privilege Management provides the ability to elevate privilege for specific applications and processes at run-time via tightly controlled, least-privilege policies. Privilege is granted only to the process, not the account.

Enforces extensive security controls to lock down access to only authorized applications.
Applies least privilege for all automation tasks.
Ensures granular least privilege controls across all endpoints, regardless of identity type.
Prevents unapproved processes and scripts from running.

Benefits with BeyondTrust’s Machine Identity Management Approach

Minimizes the Attack Surface

Enforces least privilege, manages and rotates secrets, removes standing privileges, and delivers secure remote access for machines to harden machine identity security posture.

Improves Compliance Alignment

Provides comprehensive audit trails and controls to support SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and other mandates.

Sparks Productivity Gains

Streamlines and automate machine identity security best practices at scale, freeing up time for your workforce.

Unlocks Digital Transformation

From cloud expansion, to IoT and edge computing, and RPA and agentic AI, ensures strong governance over the machine identities and associated workflows.

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FAQs

From our perspective, Machine identities is a term that includes the superset of identities for devices (hardware) and workloads (software). Workload identities and credentials are often (somewhat inaccurately) referred to as “NHIs” or non-human identities.

Workload identities are assigned to software-based entities such as applications, automation bots, containers and Kubernetes pods to enable machine-to-machine authentication and authorized access. These identities are instantiated as principals (for example, service accounts) and authenticated using credentials such as certificates, tokens and secrets (e.g., API keys).

A machine identity provides a trusted way for people, applications, and systems to verify that the machine they are communicating with is legitimate and expected. As a best practice for oversight and accountability, every machine identity should be owned by a team or individual.

NHIs also encompass the subset of autonomous AI identities (AI agents, LLMs, and co-pilots with action rights). To learn how BeyondTrust secures agentic AI, visit our solution page here: https://www.beyondtrust.com/solutions/ai-security

In our view, the term “NHI” is not very accurate, but often used to describe any identity, credential or permission assigned to workloads (i.e. software) to access resources, assets or other systems. Technically, identities, credentials and permissions are different concepts, but “NHI” is used as a collective term to refer to all of them.

“NHI management” is often used as a synonym for “machine identity and access management” (MIAM).

Machine identity and access management is the practice of securing, controlling, and auditing how non-human identities, including service accounts, workloads, robotic process automation bots, containers, scripts, and AI agents—access privileged systems, infrastructure, and data.

Machine identities often involve sensitive, or privileged access, and complex multi-chained workflows that operate with speed and scale. If their accounts or credentials are compromised or misused, it can enable attackers to infiltrate and undermine security in ways that cause significant business disruption, data breaches, poisoning of data or AI models, and other deleterious consequences.

A machine identity is a broad term for non-human identities (devices, apps, services, workloads). A workload identity is more specific: it uniquely identifies a running workload (like a service in Kubernetes or a microservice) so it can authenticate securely without relying on long-lived shared secrets. Standards like SPIFFE define workload identities and identifiers for this purpose.

The most common risks include unknown/undocumented identities (sometimes referred to as shadow identities), long-lived credentials that never rotate, credentials embedded/exposed in code, orphaned service accounts, over-provisioned identities that have risky and unnecessary levels of privilege, certificate expirations causing outages, and lack of accountability or connection to a direct owner.

Start by discovering and inventorying identities and credentials, then apply guardrails like ownership, least privilege, automated rotation/renewal, and staged policy rollouts. This helps reduce risk while keeping automation stable and avoiding “break-glass” outages tied to credential changes.

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