Non-Human Identity

What is a Non-Human Identity?

A Non-Human Identity (NHI) is the digital identity assigned to non-human entities: software agents, bots, services, machines, IoT devices, nodes of Edge AI or even AI models/services that act autonomously.

As with a human identity, an NHI enables authenticating, authorizing and auditing the actions of that entity within digital systems and processes, but adapted to the technical and operational needs of machines and automated processes.

Why does it matter for companies?

An increasing number of critical processes are executed by non-human systems: AI agents that make decisions, APIs that access sensitive data, or industrial devices that connect the plant to the cloud.

Managing non-human identities is essential to ensure security, traceability and compliance: without mature NHIs it is not possible to apply models such as Zero Trust, control privileges (PAM/IAM), audit automated decisions or guarantee accountability for automated actions.

In contexts where trust and data sovereignty are critical, NHIs enable isolating, monitoring and assigning responsibility for machine-to-machine and machine-service interactions.

How are they managed and what key considerations are there?

Managing NHIs requires a full lifecycle and specific controls: secure provisioning (binding to a unique identity), authentication (mTLS, certificates, keys, or DID-based credentials/verifiable credentials), granular authorization (roles, attribute-based policies), credential rotation and revocation, and action logging/auditing. In addition, it is necessary to:

• Hardware root of trust and attestation (TPM/secure elements) to guarantee the physical identity of devices.
• Governance and traceability to record which agent did what and why (decision logs, model versions, explainability).
• Integration with IAM / PAM and Zero Trust to apply dynamic access controls and least privilege to non-human identities.
• Risk modeling and classification of NHIs (for example: agents with access to sensitive data, agents with remote execution capability), to prioritize controls.
• Legal and accountability aspects: mechanisms to attribute actions, policies for responsible use of agents, and regulatory compliance when an NHI participates in decisions with social or legal impact.