IAM + PAM for Non-Human Identities: Building the Governance Stack

Why Your Identity Program Has a Blind Spot – and It’s Not Human

The human access has been locked down through years by most security teams. Multi-factor authentication, role-based access controls, quarterly review of access – the standard arsenal. Here though is the number that must make any security architect get momentary pause: 10-45 non-human identities to every human user on an organization network is the range that organizations currently operate.

Service accounts. API keys. OAuth tokens. CI/CD pipeline credentials. Containerized workloads. There were AI agents that invoked external APIs at 3am. Not all of them are reflected in your regular identity review process. They all do not receive a Slack message that states do you still need such access? And still they are working and they are working with sometimes high privileges on your most sensitive systems.

That’s not a gap. That’s a governance crisis.

The profession of IAM + PAM of Non-Human Identities: Building the Governance Stack has been transformed in less than two years into a niche issue to governance-level agenda due to the AI adoption placing tens of millions of automated identities within enterprise environments. The governance model is no longer a choice to make but is now the compliance and AI safety and minimum security hygiene table stakes.

What “Non-Human Identity” Actually Means

It is better to be clear on the problem space before getting into solutions.
Any digital identity that is not assigned to a human logging in using a keyboard is known as a non-human identity (NHI). In the cyberpedia provided by Palo Alto Networks, they mention service accounts, application credentials, API keys, machine certificates, OAuth tokens and, more and more, AI agents and autonomous workloads.

NHIs are not only risky, but in a certain sense. It’s their behavior:

• They are hardly rotated till something gets broken.
• They are usually developed by people who move out of the company.
• The permissions are accumulated without being reviewed.
• They do not raise alarm anomalies as human accounts.
• They are often exchanged with several services.

I have seen setups with a single service account set up to perform a one off data migration four years prior still had access to production data bases to write to; as no-one considered to decommission it. Such orphaned credential is what attackers are seeking.

The NHIMG community makes it very simple the greatest challenges are not technical. They are running – they are not visible, not possessed by anyone, and no lifecycle process.

Why Traditional IAM Alone Can’t Fix This

The Human-Centric Design Problem

The identity and access management tools had the fundamental assumption: on one extreme is a person. Password resets, multifactor authentication prompts, access certification emails – all humans Can be involved.

The NHIs do not reply to certification emails. They don’t log in through SSO. They can authenticate using secrets or using certificates or tokens which are frequently hard coded either in config files or in environment variables.

In neither of the standard IAM deployments that I have seen, non-human accounts are either aggregated into generic service account categories with no meaningful ownership tagging, or entirely out of scope of the IAM at all – operated in an informal fashion by developers or platform teams.

In the IAM challenges documentation by Oracle, it is observed that there is difficulty among most organizations in terms of visibility of; service accounts, and shared credentials. The latter issue is multiplied by the fact that, as soon as AI agents are introduced to the equation, a single AI process can create dozens of sub-identities or issue authorization on demand.

What IAM Is Actually Responsible For

To be explicit of what is owned by IAM in the NHI governance model:

• Tagging of ownership and purpose- Each NHI needs a human owner with name and stated purpose of existence.
• Approval logic- Who may request a new service account? Who sanctions high allowances?
• Entitlement management- What identity may do and is that still proper?
• Certification and review- Periodic recheck of the identity needed still required and scopes correct.
• Widening the policy barrier – Privileged and non-privileged as a norm, but not an exception.

IAM provides the answer to the question: is there any identity which should exist, and which should it be permitted to do?

It fails to provide the answer: what will happen if it requires higher access at this moment, and how can it be ensured that it will be safe?

That’s PAM’s job.

PAM’s Role: Secrets, Sessions, and Elevation

The Vault Layer

Privileged Access Management is the aspect that deals with the specifics of NHIs physical access to sensitive resources. The core components:

Secrets vaulting Credentials and API keys are not stored in the code or as environment variables, but rather created and maintained in a secrets vault (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, CyberArk, etc.). The secret is never static in config file, the NHI requests the secret at runtime.

Credential rotation – PAM systems have the ability to automatically rotate credentials, schedule or post-use. A password quickly changing every 24 hours on a service account is far more difficult to use than one which has not changed since 2021.

Just-in-time (JIT) access – NHIs do not have sustained privilege access, but instead seek to be elevated temporarily, on a temporal basis. The access expires automatically.

Session recording – It is possible to record the exact outcome of a privileged operation: PAM is able to record the commands that were issued, the data accessed, and the changes made. This audit gold to compliance.

As it has been analyzed by P0 Security on the topic of NHIs and the future of PAM, the most developed organizations are beginning to consider treating all NHIs as privileged identity by default, not only the clearly visible ones containing the word admin in the name.

How PAM and IAM Divide the Work

There are no competition but complementary systems. IAM determines the guidelines; PAM implements them during the access.

According to research conducted by OASIS Security on NHI lifecycle management, this is termed as a governance handshake wherein IAM authorizes the fact that an identity should be granted a specific degree of access; PAM regulates precisely how and when such access is accessed.

Building the End-to-End NHI Lifecycle

My Experience With Lifecycle Gaps

I have observed that, the majority of NHI incidences I have heard reported do not occur during the creation stage, but occur at the end of the life-cycle. Temporary credentials turn out to be permanent. The decommissioned applications service lingers on years. No one considers to eliminate them since no one possesses them.

Correct lifecycle model will seal those gaps on every step:

Stage 1: Create

• Requester records the purpose, owning team and predicted lifespan.
• Approx at IAM workflow invokes authorization of an identified owner.
• Only the minimum necessary permits were supplied to identity.
• Enrolled in a central NHI inventory (this cannot be compromised on compliance)

Stage 2: Approve

• Poor security: IAM checks Approval logic approval logic in IAM checks: does this identity need to exist? Is the access requested consistent with the reply?
• The high permissions are subject to second approval.
• Every approval registered with time stamps.

Stage 3: Defaulthood to the least possible extent.

• There is no privileged status of standing – JIT processes of anything beyond baseline.
• Before day one, PAM vault became the source of credential.

Stage 4: Rotate and Monitor

• Automatic rotation of credentials is managed by PAM.
• Abnormalities are identified by behavioral monitoring as things like unusual access time, unusual resource requests, new location access.
• The Hoop.dev NIST framework guide links this phase to the “Detect” and the “Respond” functions of NIST CSF.

Stage 5: Certify or Remove

• IAM certification campaigns every quarter (or semi-annually).
• Confirmation by owner: is this ID required? Is the scope of access still in place?
• PAM is triggered to revoke secrets and close sessions by a commands of Decommission process.
• Stored audit trail maintained as compliance.

This life cycle is not a theory. The concept of automated identity governance is touched upon in NIST SP 800-207 (Zero Trust Architecture), ISO 27001 Annex A, NIS2, and the EU AI Act in one way or another. In case you are working in controlled settings, this lifecycle becomes your compliance process.

The AI Agent Problem and Why It Changes Everything

Agents Are NHIs on Steroids

Traditional service account will verify, and do something before they log out. An AI agent is different. It might:

• Dynamic sub-agents or spawn child.
• Make several calls to APIs consecutively.
• Decide on the resources to use depending on the situation.
• Work on a continuous basis across the sessions.

Most current models of NHI governance are made up of that behavioral profile. It happened to me that when teams use AI agents, they typically use them as ordinary service accounts, one set of long-lived credentials, large scopes of access, and little monitoring. That’s a problem.

To be safe at scale, AI agents must have the following:

1. A service principal is not a shared credential: it exists as a unique individual. Single identity of agents, single identities.
2. The Vault-based agent requests its credentials to PAM at the point of runtime secrets are never coded.
3. Temporary credentials Tokens can be used only within the task window; credentials will not be maintained.
4. Scoped permissions – the agent only accesses the APIs and data sources that it is required in a given workflow.
5. PAM-managed elevation – when an agent requires to perform a privileged action, it will go through a JIT request, just as a human pattern would.

This is well put in the analysis of NIST 2.0 and workload identities by Aembit wherein all zero-trust principles applied to human access can be applied to workload and agent access. Check, give the limited access of information and presuppose violation.

SPIFFE/SPIRE: The Emerging Standard for Workload Identity

In the case of teams developing cloud-native infrastructure, the secure identity framework SPIFFE ( Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone) and its implementation SPIRE are becoming the preferred standard of workload identity.

The fundamental concept: any workload is presented with cryptographically verifiable identity document known as a SVID (SPIFFE Verifiable Identity Document). Workloads utilize short-lived certificates to identify themselves, instead of using fixed API keys, to a trusted authority.

This is known by NHIMG guide to SPIFFE/SPIRE as an identity-native security, where the identity is not added as a credential in the middle of the workload.

Red Hat has zero-trust workload identity manager in technology preview which goes even further by integrating SPIFFE/SPIRE with Keylime (no attestation hardware) to not only request who a workload is, but what condition it is in when requesting access.

Compliance Mapping: Where This Fits Regulatory Requirements

Security teams do not exist in a vacuum. The IAM + PAM governance stack is as follows, which would be reflected by present frameworks in the following manner:

It is worth noting the EU AI Act angle, in particular. As organizations can place AI agents on a customer front desk or a decision support desk, the need to demonstrate that the agent acted within the context of a controlled audit-funded identity governance will be mandated, rather than good practice.

Practical Patterns to Start With

For Teams Just Getting Started

1. First Inventory It is impossible to rule what you cannot see. Carry out a discovery exercise in your setting to identify every service account, API key, and token. Discovery of NHI is a specialty in tools such as Veza, on the cloud and SaaS platforms.
2. Store ownership – Each NHI receives a human owner with a name. No exceptions. In case no one will own it, it is decommissioned.
3. Vault credentials, choose a secrets management tool Transfer the most dangerous credentials at first. Don’t try to boil the ocean.
4. Establish an expedited lifecycle procedure – A checklist-only procedure is at least a step in the right direction. Creation request – approval – quarterly – decommission trigger.

For More Mature Programs

• Introduce access using JIT to any privileged NHI operations.
• Install behavioral analytics to identify the misuse of credentials.
• usability Nicandos NHI governance into your Intellectual Workflow (ServiceNow, Jira, etc.)
• Discuss SPIFFE/SPIRE to workload identity on the cloud.
• align your NHI inventory with your AI agent implementation policy.

Trust Boosters: External Resources Worth Reading

The two sources that can be used by teams that want to dive deeper are:

1. NIST SP-800 207 (Zero Trust Architecture).
   Anchor text proposal: NIST Zero Trust Architecture workload identity guidance.
   URL: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-207.pdf
   Why it matters: The final system to implement for a zero-trust federal structure, which gives specific instructions on non-human workload authentication that can be directly related to the governance patterns presented in this chapter.
2. CNCF Cloud Native Security Whitepaper.
   Suggestion of anchor text, CNCF cloud native security workload identity whitepaper.
   URL: https://www.cncf.io/reports/cloud-native-security-whitepaper/
   Why it is important: Experts in discipline Covers workload identity, secrets management, and the SPIFFE/SPIRE ecosystem in practice, in detail, and implementation-ready. The tool is particularly helpful when used by DevSecOps teams.

Where the Field Is Heading

The government issue has not disappeared, but rather has increased. With each new AI agent, each new API integration, and each new cloud service, we have an addition to the inventory in terms of NHIs. The organizations that develop the governance stack at this point when the volume can still be managed will be having a major upper hand.

The new scheme is as follows: IAM is a policy/ownership layer, PAM is an enforcement/secret layer, SPIFFE/ SPIRE (or similar) is the identity layer in cloud-native applications, and behavioral analytics is the layer of continuous monitoring. Every layer has its purpose; they all do not attempt to do everything.

To take a longer perspective on the issue of AI systems causing identity problems, one can go to the article Identity Crisis – Securing Non-Human Identities to AI Agents – this is the area where the bulk of the contemporary thought has been concentrated.

It is not necessarily the team that has the most highly-tooled teams that wins this problem. My experience demonstrated that the largest success stems out of organizations that initially do not design the process wrong i. e. clear ownership, documented lifecycle, regular reviews and then superimpose tooling.

Wrapping Up

Governance stack of non human identities is not a product and problem in itself. It is an IAM-PAM coordination model where each layer belongs to someone.

IAM regulates the existence and reason as to why. The practice of access is regulated by PAM. Collectively, these factors leave barely any organizations vulnerable to having hundreds (and occasionally thousands) of unmanaged, unscrutinized, over-privileged non-human identities lurking silently in their ecosystem.

When your company is deploying AI agents and you do not have a clear response to what identity is this agent, who owns it, and how are its credentials rotated? that’s where to start. Not the highly-developed equipment. and with the simplest of all the questions in relation to governance: does this identity possess an owner?

Define that, develop the lifecycle around that and the rest of the stack emerges.

Pranay Aduvala

I’m a technology writer with a passion for AI and digital marketing. I create engaging and useful content that bridges the gap between complex technology concepts and digital technologies. My writing makes the process easy and curious. and encourage participation I continue to research innovation and technology. Let’s connect and talk technology!