Non-Human Identity Security: A Guide to Machine Governance

A non-human identity (NHI) is any digital identity that belongs to software rather than a person. These are the automated actors in your environment, the service accounts, workloads, RPA bots, CI/CD pipelines, and AI agents that authenticate and take action without a human driving each step. Each one relies on credentials such as API keys, tokens, certificates, or passwords to prove who it is, and any actor can use any of these credential types.