Key Functionalities of Human vs Non Human Identities

1. Identity

A unique digital representation of a user, device, app or any system that can be authenticated and authorized to take action on resources.

2. Non Human Identity

It is an identity used by software and automated systems like services, apps, containers, scripts, serverless functions, CI/CD jobs, data pipelines and AI agents to authenticate and obtain authorization without human intervention.

3. AI Agent

It is an automated or semi automated software that uses an AI model to plan actions and complete all tasks with tools or API’s. Agents may works on behalf of humans, authenticated with delicated privileged access and act independently with their own credentials and workload identities.

4. Account

It is a representation of an identity within a specific systems . Single identity may have multiple accounts.

5. Credential

It is an evidence presented during authentication. Some credentials are public identifiers and others are secrets and must remain confidential.

6. Secret

It is a sensitive credential. Secrets require secure storage, rotation and access controls and proper maintenance.

7. Token

It is a time bound credential which is issued by an identity provider to assert identity or authentication during the session. Federation and passwordless authentication both rely on these tokens.

Non Human Identity vs Human Identity

1. Users

Human Identities used by users.

Non Human Identities used by everything automated, workloads and AI agents. AI agents should be governed as NHI’s, even when using delegated and user scripted tokens. Agents are workloads and those are not an employees. They lack HR lifecycle management, and act autonomously and need workload style of controls. Those are scripting, federation, logging, decommissioning to ensure least privilege and clear ownership.

2. Identification

Human identities represents people, employees, customers, contractors.

Non Human Identities represents workloads, automations, services, apps, scripts, pipelines and AI agents.

3. Creation

Human identities created by HR systems automatically.

Non Human identities will be created manually by Devops and IAM teams, or generated by automation.

4. Ownership

Human identities always tied to single person.

Non Human identities not tied to a specific person.

5. Authentication

Human identities uses Single sign On and Multifactor Authentication.

Non Human identities uses secrets, API keys, access keys, tokens, certification and workload identifiers.

6. Scale

Human identities are limited to workforce size.

Non Human identities are unlimited.

Conclusion

In today’s digital environment, both human and non-human identities play a critical role in securing enterprise data's. While human identities represent people such as employees, customers, and contractors, non-human identities represent automated systems, applications, services, scripts, pipelines, and increasingly AI agents.

With the rapid growth of cloud computing, DevOps, automation, and artificial intelligence, non-human identities are now growing at a rapid speed than human identities.