Rethinking NHI Security: The Essential Shift to Zero Trust Security and Ephemeral Identities
Cyber Defense Magazine, Thursday, October 2nd, 2025
As identity security becomes increasingly critical in cybersecurity, the focus has shifted from safeguarding human identities to protecting Non-Human Identities (NHIs)-such as API keys, service accounts, secrets, tokens, and certificates.
While traditional approaches focused on managing users and their credentials, the rapid expansion of cloud services, automation, and APIs has accelerated the growth of machine-to-machine interactions. NHIs have become some of the most critical assets within an organization's cybersecurity perimeter, facilitating business operations, automating processes, managing cloud services, and enabling seamless integration between applications and systems. However, as NHIs proliferate across cloud, SaaS, and on-premise environments, they also become significant attack vectors.