Non-Human Identity Security
Cydenti is the security layer built for machine identities: service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, and AI agents. Where IAM manages people, Cydenti manages everything that acts without one.
What Is a Non-Human Identity?
A non-human identity is any credential that lets software act without a person logging in. That covers service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, machine certificates, automation bots, and — increasingly — AI agents that carry out tasks autonomously inside your SaaS tools.
These identities have multiplied far faster than the processes meant to govern them. A 100-person company typically runs 2,000+ of them — most unowned, over-privileged relative to what they actually do, and never expired. Each one is a potential entry point into your systems, and often a wider, less-watched one than any human user account.
IAM and IGA were built for people. Non-human identities need a security layer of their own — that's the layer Cydenti provides.
The Four NHI Risk Families
Most machine-identity incidents fall into one of these four patterns.
Orphaned Credentials
The employee who created this service account or API key left the company long ago, moved teams, or never documented why the credential existed in the first place. The credential is still running — with no one watching it, rotating it, or deciding whether it can be safely removed without breaking a downstream integration. Every departure, every migration, every abandoned project leaves this kind of residue behind.
Excessive Scopes
A token created for one narrow task gets admin rights 'just in case' — and keeps them indefinitely because no one goes back to trim the scope once the project ships. Most non-human identities hold far more access than their actual job requires, which quietly turns a simple automation script into a skeleton key for systems it never needed to touch.
Dormant-but-Active Tokens
The token hasn't done anything in months — the integration it powered was replaced, the service it called got paused — but it's still valid, unexpired, and fully functional. For an attacker, a forgotten credential that still works is the ideal entry point: no alert fires, because no activity was ever expected from it to begin with.
Unowned AI Agents
AI agents now connect to your SaaS tools with their own credentials — often spun up in a few clicks by a business team eager to automate a workflow, with no security review, no clearly assigned owner, and no explicit boundary on what the agent can read, write, or trigger on your behalf. As agentic AI moves from pilot to production, this category is growing faster than any other non-human identity type — and it inherits every risk pattern above at once: orphaned the moment the project owner moves on, over-scoped from day one, and easy to forget once the initial excitement fades.
Why NHI, Why Now
Regulatory pressure is converging
NIS2 enforcement tightens from October 1, 2026, and ANSSI's ReCyF framework — Objective 13 in particular — explicitly names service accounts, machine credentials, and privileged access as controls in their own right, not a footnote tacked onto the human identity chapter. DORA extends the same expectation to financial entities, and the EU AI Act adds a fresh layer of obligations around how autonomous AI agents are governed. In practice, that changes what the auditor asks for: not a user list, but a service-account inventory, a named owner for every machine credential, and proof that dormant tokens get retired or rotated. For most GRC teams, that shift lands as new, ongoing work: NHI evidence has to stay current and defensible, not get reconstructed retroactively when the audit window opens.
The AI-agent explosion
Every new copilot, every workflow automation, every MCP integration a team wires up mints one more non-human identity — often in a few clicks, often with no one from security in the loop. That pace outruns any manual process built to track it: by the time an inventory gets refreshed, three more agents have already been granted access to production systems. The gap between what exists and what's actually governed doesn't close on its own — it widens every month a company relies on a spreadsheet or tribal knowledge instead of continuous discovery. Security teams that once tracked every integration in a spreadsheet now face an inventory that changes daily, sometimes hourly, as new agents get connected without a formal request ever being filed.
The breach reality
The starting point behind the largest recent breaches isn't a phished password — it's a stolen service-account token, an OAuth app that kept far more scope than it needed, or a key that was never rotated after the project that created it shipped. Machine credentials don't trip the alerts built for human logins, which is exactly what makes them the quieter, more reliable way in for an attacker. Post-incident reviews increasingly trace the initial foothold back to a credential nobody was watching — proof that identity hygiene for machines has become just as critical as it has always been for people.
How Cydenti Covers the NHI Lifecycle
Five steps, from first scan to compliance evidence.
Discover
A complete non-human identity inventory in 27 minutes via read-only API — service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, machine certificates, and AI agents, across your entire SaaS stack. No agent to install, no maintenance window to negotiate.
Own
Every machine identity is assigned an accountable human owner — no more service accounts that belong to no one and that no one dares touch for fear of breaking something. Ownership becomes a recorded fact, not a guess.
Harden
Continuous posture checks and rotation guidance bring every credential back toward least privilege and a controlled lifespan — before an overly broad scope or a secret that's never been rotated becomes the easiest attack path in the environment.
Defend
Identity threat detection and response (ITDR) built for machine behavior — not human login patterns. Cydenti catches abnormal service account or token usage before it turns into a declared incident.
Prove
Continuous, audit-ready evidence mapped to NIS2, DORA, and the EU AI Act — not a point-in-time screenshot assembled the night before the audit. NHI compliance becomes a byproduct of daily operations, not a separate project.
What IAM Sees vs. What Cydenti Sees
IAM and Cydenti aren't competitors — they cover two different halves of the same problem.
Cydenti is not an IAM or IGA tool. It complements yours — Okta, Entra ID, or anything else — by watching the machine identities living around it, the ones those tools were never built to see.
Discover the machine identities you didn't know you had
— in 27 minutes, for free.
NIS2 enforcement begins October 1, 2026. The Audit Flash delivers your complete NHI exposure snapshot — service accounts, orphaned credentials, OAuth grants, AI agents — with a first report in 3 hours. No commitment.
No commitment • No credit card • Data hosted in Europe • Response within 24h