Managing and controlling human identity is very well done with a set of dedicated tools, frameworks and best practices. This is a very different world when it comes to non-human identities, also known as machine identity. Gitguardian’s end-to-end NHI security platform is here to fill the gap.
Companies track machine identity
Machine Identity – Service accounts, API keys, bots, automation, workload identities are now surpassed by 100:1.
Without robust governance, NHIS will become the main target of attackers. Isolated qualifications, privileged accounts, and the secrets of “zombies” are growing, especially as organizations accelerate their adoption of the cloud, integrate AI-powered agents, and automate infrastructure.
The Expansion of Secrets: New Attack Surface
Gitguardian’s research shows that 70% of the valid secrets found in public repositories in 2022 remain active in 2025, a window of vulnerability for three years. These are not merely theoretical risks. Violations in organizations such as the US Treasury Department, Toyota, and the New York Times all began with leaked or uncontrolled machine identity.
Volume isn’t the only problem. Secrets and credentials are scattered across codes, CI/CD pipelines, cloud environments, and ticketing systems. This is a traditional outside security perimeter environment.
This spread of uncontrolled secrets has attracted the attention of security frameworks around the world. The newly released OWASP top 10 non-human identity risk in 2025 calls “secret leaks” specifically as a risk in #2, noting that compromised credentials are related to more than 80% of violations.
Why is a secret manager not enough?
Traditional secret managers (such as Hashicorp Vault, Cyberark, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault) are essential for secure storage, but do not address the complete lifecycle of NHI governance. They should not discover secrets outside the safe, discover that they lack context regarding permissions, or automate repairs when secrets are leaked or misused.
Gitguardian’s own analysis found that organizations using secret managers are actually more likely to leak secrets. The incidence of secret leakage in repositories that utilize managers is 5.1% compared to 4.6% of public repositories where secret managers are not in place. And to add to this point, repositories with secret managers are more likely to process sensitive information, increasing the risk of exposure.
Platforms that fill the NHI security gap
To address these challenges, organizations need to adopt a unified IAM strategy
In addition to deploying Secrets Management Solutions (Vaults and or Secrets Managers), it also forces DevOps and SRE teams to effectively manage and protect NHIS. This requires investment in solutions that provide comprehensive secret discovery, centralized visibility and automated governance capabilities. By leveraging tools that can map relationships between secrets, enforce consistent policies, and streamline the rotation and remediation process, DevOps and SRE teams can focus on reducing the burden of secrecy lifecycle management and delivering value to their business.
Gitguardian’s NHI security platform is designed to address these precise blind spots and risks. Here’s how:
1. Discovery and Stock: Finding the Invisible
Manual discovery of machine identity is a lost battle. Secrets exist across repository, CI/CD pipelines, ticket systems, messengers, and cloud environments. In many cases, the security team does not monitor it. Traditional approaches fail to keep pace with the dynamic nature of modern infrastructure, leading to incomplete inventory.
Gitguardian’s automatic discovery continuously scans these environments and maintains real-time inventory rich in contextual metadata. This intensive view serves as the foundation for effective governance.
2. Onboarding and Provisioning: Protect from Day 1
An inconsistent provisioning process creates immediate risks, including beauty configurations, overly permitted identities, and manual errors. Organizations need standardized workflows that implement minimal privileged access and integrate with centralized secret management.
A unified platform ensures consistency between teams, gives permissions real-time visibility, and maintains a secure, compliant ecosystem from the start.
3. Continuous surveillance: Go ahead of the threat
Modern businesses face surveillance nightmares. Machine identities interact in many systems, each with a separate logging mechanism. By averaging an organization through six different secret management instances (“Practitioner Voice: AppSec’s Secret Status”), it becomes nearly impossible to maintain a consistent policy.
Normalizes GitGuardian aggregates and data used from multiple sources to provide centralized visibility. Advanced analysis and anomaly detection allow for rapid response to high-risk events and policy violations.
4. Rotate and Repair: Keep your credentials fresh
The stakes are high. CyberArc reports that 72% of organizations have experienced certificate-related suspensions over the past year, and 34% have suffered from multiple incidents. Managing large rotations is complicated, especially with system dependencies and inconsistent schedules.
Gitguardian integrates with popular secret managers to provide contextual insights to identify owners and streamline remediation, minimizing the impact of security incidents.
5. Decommission: Zombie Credentials Elimination
Unused or old identities accumulate as “zombie” credentials. This is the prime target of the attacker. Fragmented tools and inconsistent processes make proper off-boarding difficult and sustained security gaps.
Gitguardian’s ongoing oversight will identify candidates for decommissioning.
Use an interactive demo to see Gitguardian’s NHI security platform is indeed working. Discover important features that security teams and IAM leaders love
Compliance and Zero Trust: Modern missions
Frameworks such as PCI DSS 4.0 and NIST explicitly require strong control of machine identity. Gitguardian’s platform is built with these requirements in mind and will help organizations continue to adhere to as regulations evolve.
Conclusion: Don’t wait for a violation
The interests are high. It’s about controlling financial losses, reputational damage, compliance failures, and most critically, the digital infrastructure that makes your business work.
The advanced CISO is currently bringing NHIS into the IAM strategy. Gitguardian’s platform is a comprehensive, automated solution for discovering, managing and protecting the identity of all machines before attackers do it.
Watch the 20-minute live 20-minute demo of Gitguardian NHI Security on June 25th. See how GitGuardian can help.
Improved security hygiene to gain visibility through all NHI secrets across the infrastructure reduces violations caused by inappropriate identity
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