Zero Trust's Missing Link: The Governance Crisis in Non-Human Identity Management

The cybersecurity community just received a wake-up call. OWASP's release of the Top 10 Non-Human Identity Risks for 2025 represents more than just another security framework — it's formal recognition that we're facing a fundamental governance crisis. While the industry has spent years perfecting human identity management, 46% of organizations have experienced compromises of non-human identity accounts or credentials over the past year, revealing a massive blind spot in our security strategies.

As organizations race to implement Zero Trust architectures, they're discovering that securing human identities was just the beginning. The real challenge lies in managing the exponential growth of machine identities that now power modern digital infrastructure.

The Scale of the Challenge: It's Worse Than We Thought

The numbers are staggering. For every human employee in an organization, there are, on average, 92 non-human identities. But it's not just about quantity — it's about the quality of governance surrounding these critical assets.

Recent research reveals alarming gaps in how organizations manage their non-human identities:

These statistics paint a picture of an ecosystem where non-human identities proliferate unchecked, creating what security experts now recognize as the next major attack vector.

The OWASP Wake-Up Call: Formalizing the Crisis

The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 project represents a significant milestone in the cybersecurity landscape, as one of the most trusted security communities now recognizes non-human identities as a significant issue that needs to be addressed by the enterprise.

The top risks identified by OWASP reveal the depth of the governance challenge:

1. 1 Improper Offboarding — inadequate deactivation or removal of non-human identities when they are no longer needed.
2. 2 Secret Leakage — leakage of sensitive NHIs such as API keys, tokens, encryption keys, and certificates to unsanctioned data stores.
3. 3 Insecure Authentication — legacy or weak authentication mechanisms that expose organizations to significant risks.
4. 4 Over-Privileged NHIs — identities assigned significantly more privileges than required for their function.

Part of the issue driving the need for a better approach to NHIs is the lack of clear definitions of ownership. If developers introduce a new service, are they ultimately responsible for it in production? What about the end of life for that NHI? Does the IAM team own these identities, or does IT or Security own them?

The PKI Governance Gap: Where Certificates Meet Chaos

From a PKI perspective, the challenge is particularly acute. Only 47% of organizations said they have an enterprise-wide strategy for managing PKI and machine identities. When no one owns the PKI strategy, there can be no alignment around best practices or decision-making around identity-related conflicts.

The certificate lifecycle management crisis is real:

• Certificate validity periods are shrinking — Apple has proposed reducing TLS certificate validity to 47 days by 2028.
• Enterprises struggle with fragmented visibility of certificates across hybrid multi-cloud environments, leading to increased risk of expired or improperly configured certificates.
• DevOps teams continue to rely on expired and self-signed certificates in applications, workloads, and cloud services.

Organizations that fail to establish proper PKI governance find themselves in reactive mode, responding to certificate outages rather than preventing them through proactive management.

The Compliance Imperative: Regulations Catching Up

The regulatory landscape is beginning to catch up with the NHI challenge. The latest PCI DSS 4.0 guidelines already incorporate stronger controls around authentication and access management, including requirements that could extend to NHIs. External auditors, especially in highly regulated industries, are increasingly questioning organizations about their NHI controls — a trend driven by breaches involving unmanaged NHIs.

This shift means that organizations can no longer treat machine identity management as a technical afterthought. It's becoming a compliance necessity that requires the same rigor applied to human identity governance.

The Quantum Factor: Adding Urgency to an Already Critical Problem

The approaching quantum computing era adds another layer of complexity to the NHI governance challenge. As advancements in quantum computing edge closer and the threat to classical encryption grows, organizations must accelerate efforts to implement quantum-resistant encryption algorithms.

PKI infrastructures must be future-proofed for cryptographic agility — the ability to quickly adapt to new quantum-resilient algorithms without service disruptions. Organizations not only need to govern their current machine identities effectively but also ensure their governance frameworks can adapt to quantum-safe cryptography transitions.

The challenge is particularly acute for long-lived machine identities deployed in environments where updates are difficult or impossible. Manufacturing equipment, IoT sensors, and embedded systems may operate for decades, requiring governance frameworks that can manage cryptographic transitions across extended operational lifecycles.

Building Effective NHI Governance: Lessons from the Field

The path forward requires more than technology — it demands a fundamental shift in how organizations approach identity governance. Based on emerging best practices and lessons learned from early adopters, effective NHI governance requires:

Establishing Clear Ownership Models

Organizations need to move beyond the confusion about who owns non-human identities. Establishing a Crypto Center of Excellence (CCoE) or a machine identity working group with cross-functional participants has proven effective at preventing silos and maintaining visibility of cryptographic assets.

Implementing Automated Discovery and Inventory

Manual discovery of machine identities is a lost battle. Secrets exist across repositories, CI/CD pipelines, ticketing systems, messengers, and cloud environments — often in places security teams don't monitor. Automated discovery tools that maintain real-time inventories are becoming essential for effective governance.

Enforcing Lifecycle Management

Organizations need standardized workflows that enforce least-privilege access and integrate with centralized secrets management. This includes automated provisioning, regular rotation schedules, and systematic decommissioning processes.

Integrating with Existing Identity Frameworks

Rather than creating separate management silos, organizations should extend their existing identity governance platforms to encompass non-human identities — integrating NHI management with established IAM solutions from partners like Okta, SailPoint, and CyberArk.

The Business Case: From Technical Problem to Strategic Imperative

The business impact of poor NHI governance extends far beyond security incidents. Compromised identities now account for one-third of security incidents, and more than 90% of organizations reported multiple identity-related breaches in the last year.

Certificate outages alone create significant business disruption, with nearly 40% of outages taking over four hours to identify and remediate. Combined with regulatory compliance requirements and the approaching quantum transition, NHI governance becomes a strategic business imperative rather than just a technical necessity.

Organizations that establish effective NHI governance frameworks today position themselves to:

• Prevent costly security incidents and outages.
• Meet evolving compliance requirements.
• Support rapid business scaling without security compromises.
• Prepare for the quantum-safe cryptography transition.

A Path Forward: From Crisis to Control

The non-human identity governance crisis represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Organizations that recognize the scope of the problem and take proactive steps to address it will gain significant competitive advantages over those that continue to manage machine identities reactively.

At Olympus Solutions, we're helping organizations bridge this governance gap by combining deep PKI expertise with proven identity management practices. Our approach recognizes that effective NHI governance isn't about replacing existing investments — it's about extending proven human identity governance frameworks to encompass the full spectrum of organizational identities.

The path forward requires collaboration between PKI specialists, identity governance experts, and DevOps teams. By establishing clear ownership models, implementing automated lifecycle management, and integrating with existing identity platforms, organizations can transform their approach from reactive crisis management to proactive identity governance.

The OWASP Top 10 Non-Human Identity Risks serves as a roadmap for this transformation. Now it's time for organizations to move from awareness to action — establishing the governance frameworks needed to secure their expanding universe of machine identities.

By combining Olympus's deep expertise in enterprise identity governance with specialized IoT and device-security capabilities, we're enabling organizations to achieve true Zero Trust — one that recognizes every connected endpoint as a potential attack vector requiring verification, not assumption.