Posted by Suresh Sathyamurthy
February 25, 2025
As organizations continue to automate workflows and integrate cloud services, the management of non-human identities (NHIs) becomes a critical security challenge. The OWASP Top 10 Non-Human Identities Risks for 2025 highlights the biggest threats facing machine identities, service accounts, and automation credentials. Akeyless, with its advanced Secrets and Machine Identity Management platform, provides robust solutions to mitigate each of these risks.
Before diving into how the Akeyless Secrets & Machine Identity Platform addresses nearly every element of the Top 10 NHI Risks for 2025, I want to share a little context. I live and work in Silicon Valley—and yes, I’m also a fan of the hit HBO show Silicon Valley. With that in mind, let’s consider a hypothetical company, Hooli, a cloud-based software development powerhouse (naturally, it’s based in the Valley—next time, I’ll sprinkle in some AI for good measure).
1. Improper Offboarding
Challenge: Hooli frequently deploys temporary services for client projects. However, they sometimes overlook deactivating service accounts and access keys after project completion, leaving unused NHIs active. As a result, these orphaned NHIs can be exploited by malicious actors to gain unauthorized access to sensitive systems and data, as they remain valid entry points into the company’s infrastructure.
How Akeyless Helps: To counter this, Akeyless automates the lifecycle management of secrets and non-human identities. By setting expiration policies and automating the revocation of unused secrets, Akeyless ensures that obsolete NHIs at Hooli are promptly deactivated, reducing potential vulnerabilities.
2. Secret Leakage
Challenge: During a code review, Hooli discovers that developers have hardcoded API keys into source code repositories. If unauthorized individuals access these repositories, the exposed API keys can be used to infiltrate Hooli’s systems, leading to data breaches and potential financial losses.
How Akeyless Helps: To prevent such leaks, Akeyless centralizes secrets management with zero-knowledge encryption, ensuring that Hooli’s sensitive information is never exposed in code. It also integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, injecting secrets securely at runtime and preventing unauthorized access.
3. Vulnerable Third-Party NHIs
Challenge: Hooli integrates various third-party plugins into their development environment. If one of these plugins is compromised, it could potentially access sensitive credentials, allowing attackers to manipulate or steal data, disrupt services, or move laterally within Hooli’s network.
How Akeyless Helps: Akeyless mitigates this risk by enforcing least-privilege access controls, granting third-party integrations only the permissions they require. Additionally, continuous monitoring and automatic rotation of secrets further protect Hooli against unauthorized access from compromised third-party tools.
4. Insecure Authentication
Challenge: Hooli’s legacy systems use outdated authentication methods without multi-factor authentication (MFA). Attackers can easily exploit these weak authentication mechanisms to gain unauthorized access, leading to potential data breaches and system compromises.
How Akeyless Helps: Akeyless supports modern authentication protocols, including MFA and certificate-based methods. By migrating to these secure authentication mechanisms, Hooli can protect its systems from potential breaches.
5. Overprivileged NHIs
Challenge: To expedite development, Hooli team assigns broad privileges to service accounts. However, if an overprivileged NHI is compromised, attackers can perform unauthorized actions, potentially leading to data theft, service disruptions, or complete system takeovers.
How Akeyless Helps: Through role-based and attribute-based access controls, Akeyless ensures NHIs are granted only the permissions necessary for their functions without slowing development. This principle of least privilege minimizes the impact of potential security incidents at Hooli.
6. Insecure Cloud Deployment Configurations
Challenge: Hooli’s CI/CD pipelines use static credentials stored in configuration files. If these files are accessed maliciously, attackers can use the static credentials to infiltrate production environments, leading to data breaches and unauthorized system modifications.
How Akeyless Helps: Akeyless eliminates this risk by replacing static credentials with ephemeral, short-lived secrets that are generated on demand. This approach reduces the window of opportunity for attackers and enhances the security of Hooli’s deployment processes.
7. Long-Lived Secrets
Challenge: Some of Hooli’s API keys and tokens have no expiration dates. If these long-lived secrets are compromised, attackers can maintain prolonged unauthorized access to sensitive services without detection.
How Akeyless Helps: To mitigate this, Akeyless automates the rotation of all Hooli’s secrets, ensuring they are regularly updated and have appropriate expiration periods. This practice limits the potential damage from exposed credentials.
8. Environment Isolation
Challenge: Hooli uses the same credentials across development, testing, and production environments. Consequently, a security issue in the less secure development environment could propagate to production, compromising live data and services.
How Akeyless Helps: Akeyless enforces strict environment isolation by assigning unique secrets and access policies to each environment. This segregation prevents issues in one environment from affecting others.
9. NHI Reuse
Challenge: To simplify management, Hooli reuses the same service accounts across multiple applications. However, if one application is compromised, the shared NHI can be a gateway for attackers to access other applications, leading to widespread breaches.
How Akeyless Helps: Akeyless provides unique, ephemeral identities for each application instance at Hooli, eliminating the risks associated with credential reuse. This ensures that a breach in one application doesn’t compromise others.
10. Human Use of NHIs
Challenge: Administrators at Hooli sometimes use service account credentials for manual tasks. Unfortunately, this practice reduces accountability and can lead to security gaps, as actions performed using NHIs are harder to trace back to individual users, complicating incident response efforts.
How Akeyless Helps: Akeyless helps by distinguishing between human and machine identities, enforcing appropriate use policies for each. Human users authenticate through enterprise identity providers, while NHIs utilize secure API-based authentication, maintaining clear separation and accountability.
Conclusion
The OWASP Top 10 Non-Human Identity Risks highlight the growing security challenges organizations face in managing automated access. Akeyless provides a comprehensive Secrets and Machine Identity Management platform that not only mitigates these risks but also enhances security posture through automation, zero-trust principles, and robust access controls.
By adopting Akeyless, organizations like Hooli can ensure their NHIs remain secure, compliant, and resilient against evolving cyber threats.
Want to learn more? Sign up for a demo to see how the Akeyless platform can protect your organization.
