From Human to Non-Human Identities: Comprehensive Identity Protection Across the Ecosystem

As businesses shift towards distributed architectures, cloud adoption, and increased automation, Non-Human Identities (NHIs) have become critical components of the modern IT infrastructure. The NHI ecosystem is fragmented and diverse, with NHIs being found across cloud and on-premises environments, machine and cloud workloads, Active Directory service accounts, and SaaS applications, leading to management complexities and security blind spots.

Organizations struggle to implement effective monitoring and protection of NHIs, while the combination of NHI sprawl and fragmentation results in various gaps and vulnerabilities posing significant security risks. Compounding this challenge is the fact that many NHIs are implemented without proper documentation, often with default settings and high privileges, and are frequently forgotten over time. This lack of visibility and control makes NHIs perfect targets for malicious actors.

The latest major breaches caused by NHI exploitations, such as those affecting Cloudflare and AWS, have underscored the need to identify and manage risks associated with NHIs. A recent survey by Cloud Security Alliance confirms that one in five organizations has experienced a security incident related to NHIs, with only 15% of organizations feeling confident in their ability to secure NHIs. 

Addressing these challenges requires a multi-faceted approach, including significantly improving detection across the identity fabric for all identity types - human and non-human, as well as the relationships between them. Organizations must address existing security and control gaps, eliminate blind spots, and ensure that any anomalous or risky behavior is detected in real-time. 

Navigating the Complexity of NHIs with AuthMind 

AuthMind's approach to identity protection is based on the detection and protection of all identities, human and non-human, across various applications and deployment models, including multi-cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments. By analyzing all identity-related activities and access flows in full context, AuthMind helps reduce the organization's overall risk exposure, improve identity security posture, and ensure compliance with internal policies, best practices, and regulatory requirements.

When it comes to managing and securing NHIs, the AuthMind Identity Protection Platform provides full real-time visibility, monitoring, and protection of NHIs across the entire infrastructure and different types of environments within. 

By adopting this approach to NHI protection, AuthMind enables customers to:

• Obtain comprehensive NHI observability across all environments with extensive granularity to reveal what types of NHIs exist in their identity infrastructure, where, how they are being managed, and whether there are any related issues or risks.
• Uncover NHI-related infrastructure issues and blind spots
• Detect and address anomalies and risky NHI-related activity

Continuous monitoring and automated alerting through the out-of-the-box playbooks ensure security and identity teams always stay on top of the discovered gaps and risks. 

Unmatched NHI visibility and contextual observability

AuthMind discovers and creates a detailed inventory of all NHIs across various environments, leveraging ML-driven traffic behavior analysis, and provides real-time monitoring of all NHI-related activities and access paths. The platform segments NHIs by type (service principal, computer account, service account, application, token, keys, and secrets) and environment. Additionally, AuthMind classifies identities as a user, background browsing, or agent.

Comprehensive visibility helps security and identity teams understand the full context of NHI activities and their relationships with other identity types. As a result, teams can swiftly respond to potential threats, address gaps and vulnerabilities, and maintain a robust security posture. The availability of a complete NHI inventory, combined with contextualized observability, enables critical use cases for enhancing identity security posture and effectively managing NHIs.

This enables customers to: 

• Query and contextualize activities based on specific types of NHIs and environments
• Review all the resources accessed by any NHI in the network or cloud, helping verify whether some identities are over-privileged
• Identify all identity systems that use the NHIs to perform their operations, including identity providers (IDPs), key/token/secrets managers or vaults, directories (e.g. AD, LDAP), PAM, and password managers.

Discovering and Resolving NHI-Related Infrastructure Issues and Blind Spots

Potential identity infrastructure issues and blind spots are always at the core of identity and security teams' concerns. AuthMind empowers security and identity teams to uncover and mitigate potential identity infrastructure gaps and vulnerabilities associated with NHIs:

• Credential Management and Rotation: AuthMind detects NHIs with compromised or weak credentials, as well as keys and tokens that haven't been rotated or refreshed periodically. This is crucial for preventing common exploitation vectors, such as those seen in recent high-profile breaches.

• Detecting NHI Misuse: AuthMind’s identity observability surfaces instances of potential misuse of NHIs by human users or when human identities are being used as NHIs, a critical risk factor for security and identity teams.
• Identifying Inactive and Forgotten NHIs: The platform surfaces inactive or forgotten NHIs, posing significant security risks if left unmanaged. This capability helps improve identity hygiene and strengthen the security posture.
• Attack Detection on NHI Infrastructure: AuthMind helps identify various attacks targeting NHIs and their infrastructure, including brute-force attempts, password sprays, admin enumeration, relay attacks, and botnet activities.

Detecting NHI Anomalies, Risks, and Threats Across the Entire Enterprise 

AuthMind's real-time monitoring and advanced analytics help identify suspicious activities and potential threats related to NHIs:

• Access Token Sharing: The platform detects the sharing of access tokens, which can lead to unauthorized access and data exfiltration. 
• Unauthorized Access and Privilege Abuse: To prevent privilege escalation and detect lateral movement attempts, AuthMind discovers NHIs being used from unauthorized hosts or IPs, as well as NHIs accessing unauthorized resources (or vice versa).
• Anomalous Patterns: AuthMind detects both misuse of NHIs by human users and NHIs communicating with unknown or unauthorized SaaS apps or public hosts/IPs, which could indicate potential data leakage or malicious activity. 
• Bypass of Security Controls: The platform helps identify instances where NHIs bypass key, token, and secrets managers, including Privileged Access Management (PAM) systems.

Beyond NHIs: AuthMind's Holistic Approach to Identity Protection  

While non-human identities are a critical concern in today's cybersecurity landscape, AuthMind recognizes that they are just one part of a complex identity ecosystem. 

Non-human identities are a critical component of the identity fabric, along with human identities. Therefore, comprehensive visibility and in-depth analysis for all types of identities across various applications and deployment models, including multi-cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments, is essential for effective identity protection.

That is exactly why The AuthMind Platform is designed to safeguard all types of identities within the organization and provide complete identity protection. AuthMind's all-encompassing coverage empowers organizations to improve identity hygiene, efficiently identify and remediate identity-related risks and threats, and manage their long-term identity security posture.

Request a personalized demo to learn how AuthMind can help address your specific identity security needs.