The rapidly growing number of ungoverned machine identities are creating massive holes in an organization’s identity attack surface. By some estimates, these non-human identities are outnumbering standard user accounts by 50 to 1.
Machine Identity
Discovery
Problem
Machine identities cannot have the same security or governance policies as standard human accounts. Typically, these accounts have higher privileges than standard user accounts and utilize long-lived credentials, requiring unique password management, vaulting, and credential rotation policies.
Risk
The sheer number of machine identities make them prime targets because they are more likely to have privileged access rights.
Solution
Establish mechanisms for gaining visibility of all machine identities and maintain a real-time inventory of new and existing accounts in order to ensure coverage in policies within other security tools.
Challenges Discovering and Managing Machine Identities
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Difficulty managing machine identities stems from the proliferation of non-human digital entities across increasingly distributed, ephemeral, and dynamically generated cloud systems. The difficulty lies in discovering, tracking, and securing the continuously-expanding number of machine identities due to the growing use of service accounts and API keys for integrations, containers, serverless functions, microservices, and interconnected IoT devices within hybrid cloud environments. The result is unprecedented levels of technological complexity and constant flow of identities being generated. This challenge demands sophisticated discovery mechanisms capable of mapping rapidly changing machine identities back to an actual human account owner in order to maintain maintaining visibility and ensure all security tools account for these resources. Successful strategies for discovering and managing machine identities include:
- Comprehensive Discovery Capabilities: Identity mapping technologies that utilize multi-vector scanning and event collection techniques, leveraging automated discovery mechanisms capable of identifying ephemeral and programmatically generated identities across any data source.
- Continuous Compliance Monitoring: Establish persistent machine identity governance frameworks that automatically detect policy violations, generate real-time compliance insights, and proactively remediate potential security risks associated with unmanaged or misconfigured machine identities.
- Dynamic Lifecycle Management: Deploy identity governance solutions that automatically detect, classify, and reconcile machine credentials, implementing intelligent policy enforcement and automated rotation workflows.
- Cross-Platform Identity Normalization: Develop unified machine identity management strategies that that include every location an identity can live, creating normalized discovery and management frameworks capable of consistently identifying and controlling machine identities across heterogeneous systems.
- Credential Exposure Prevention: Incorporate machine credential management solutions that leverage secret rotation, just-in-time access strategies, and comprehensive auditing to precisely control and monitor machine identity interactions.
Gain visibility and control of all of every machine identity
Get Control of Machine Identities
Uncover shadow machine accounts that are not managed by your PAM vault or IGA policies, ensuring applicable governance policies are applied. Then utilize integrations to apply security policies that are specific to machine identities with the understanding that MFA cannot be utilized because no human is involved in approving authentication requests.
Ensure Policies Specific to Non-Human Accounts Are Applied
Guarantee total coverage of any credential type across on-premise, SaaS, custom identity system and application. Manage and vault any every password, certificate, SSH key, or security key/token with the vault you already own.
Associate Every Machine Identity With A Human Owner
Guarantee complete identity lifecycle governance by automatically correlating multiple machine accounts to a single human identity so that the applicable governance policies can be approved by the human owner of machine accounts.
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