How Okta Mitigates OWASP’s Top 10 Non-Human Identity Risks

Non-human identities (NHI), including machine identities, service accounts, API keys, and automation tools, play a critical role in modern cloud environments and enterprise applications. Yet, the proliferation of secrets—like hardcoded credentials, tokens, and certificates—introduces security risks that can be exploited if not properly managed. As a result, NHIs have become a significant attack vector, with OWASP’s Top 10 Non-Human Identity Risks for 2025 shedding light on the vulnerabilities that can compromise even the most sophisticated organizations. 

NHIs are inherently difficult to secure, because they are often non-federated, lack multi-factor authentication (MFA), and have static credentials that aren’t regularly rotated. These factors, combined with excessive privileges and a high blast radius, create an attractive attack vector for adversaries.

Without clear ownership, real-time visibility, or automated security controls, NHIs can easily become a blind spot, making it difficult for organizations to detect, verify, and respond to security risks. From improper offboarding and insecure authentication to secret leakage and overprivileged accounts, these risks demand a proactive and strategic approach to identity security.

At Okta, we recognize the critical importance of securing non-human identities, and have developed solutions that empower organizations to mitigate these risks effectively. 

In this article, we’ll provide some suggestions for addressing OWASP’s top 10 NHI risks using the Okta Platform—from securing sensitive credentials to enforcing least-privilege access and streamlining Identity lifecycle management.

Understanding OWASP’s Top 10 Non-Human Identity Risks

The OWASP Top 10 Non-Human Identity Risks for 2025 provides a critical roadmap for organizations to understand and address vulnerabilities associated with NHIs. These risks span a wide range of attack vectors, ranging from improper offboarding to secret leakage, highlight how unmanaged or poorly secured NHIs can become an entry point for threat actors to exploit sensitive systems.

These risks collectively emphasize the need for a robust, automated Identity management system that can monitor, control, and secure non-human identities throughout their lifecycle. Okta provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for visibility, remediation, and vaulting of non-human identities—integrating security for both human and non-human accounts within a single, unified system.

Seamless interoperability and automation with OIN

The Okta Integration Network (OIN) plays a pivotal role in addressing the OWASP top 10 NHI risks by providing pre-built integrations that enable seamless interoperability and automate critical Identity management workflows.

For example, organizations using AWS, GitHub, and Kubernetes (can) publish integrations on the OIN to enforce secure access policies for non-human identities, ensuring service accounts and API keys have least-privilege permissions and automated credential rotation. These integrations help eliminate manual errors, reduce the risk of secret sprawl, and enhance visibility into NHI activity across cloud environments.

Okta’s highly extensible platform allows organizations to securely connect key systems and applications, such as CI/CD pipelines, cloud services, and SaaS platforms, while integrating capabilities like lifecycle management, privileged access enforcement, and automated credential rotation. By offering pre-built integrations and automations, OIN integrations reduce the complexity of managing non-human identities and help ensure that key tasks, like offboarding and access review, are executed efficiently and securely.

Proactive protection: how ISPM strengthens non-human Identity security

Unlike point solutions that focus only on non-human identities, Okta’s Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) takes a unified approach—providing comprehensive visibility into both human and machine identities within an organization. Unlike traditional tools that require extensive manual effort, ISPM automatically segments non-human identities from human users and surfaces only actionable security risks, helping security teams prioritize threats without operational overhead.

ISPM can play critical role in addressing OWASP's non-human Identity risks. Through continuous monitoring, ISPM provides organizations with unprecedented, real-time insights into their NHI security posture across cloud and SaaS environments.

For improper offboarding (NHI1), ISPM's detection capabilities identify unused or orphan service accounts and unused administrative roles, helping prevent unauthorized access through forgotten credentials. The platform's advanced analytics detect overprivileged NHIs (NHI5) by analyzing permission usage patterns and flagging excessive administrative rights, while also identifying concerning scenarios like AWS cross-account privilege escalation. When ISPM detects these risky accounts, Okta Workflows can help create custom actions, such as suspending or disabling based on predefined triggers and conditions, providing immediate risk reduction without manual intervention. This automated remediation through Workflows accelerates the security response while ensuring consistent policy enforcement across the organization's Identity ecosystem.​​​​​​​​​

ISPM can also help tackle authentication risks (NHI4) head-on by monitoring multi factor authentication (MFA) coverage and detecting SSO bypass attempts across both human and non-human Identities. Okta Platform’s continuous validation helps ensure that service accounts maintain proper authentication controls, with special attention to critical administrative access. When it comes to long-lived secrets (NHI7), ISPM actively monitors for unrotated API keys and aging service account credentials across platforms like AWS, Azure, and Salesforce. The solution's integration with Okta Workflows enables automated remediation, allowing organizations to enforce credential rotation policies systematically.

Environment isolation concerns (NHI8) and NHI reuse (NHI9) are addressed through ISPM's comprehensive Identity Graph, which maps relationships between accounts, permissions, and resources across different environments. This visibility helps security teams identify inappropriate access patterns and enforce proper segmentation. The platform's sophisticated classification engine helps distinguish between human and non-human identities (NHI10), flagging instances where service accounts show patterns of interactive human usage. Combined with detailed audit trails and usage analytics, this enables organizations to maintain clear accountability and enforce proper access patterns.

By providing real-time visibility, prioritized risk assessment, and guided remediation paths, ISPM empowers organizations to manage their non-human identity risks while maintaining operational efficiency proactively. The Okta Platform’s integration with broader Identity security workflows ensures that organizations can maintain robust NHI security posture at scale.

Protecting NHI accounts with Okta Privileged Access

While ISPM focuses on monitoring and assessing security posture across non-human identities, Okta Privileged Access is designed to actively protect and enforce security controls for NHI accounts. For organizations that need to meet regulations or maintain least privilege, Okta Privileged Access helps safeguard your most critical resources—including privileged accounts across servers, applications, and NHIs.

Because NHI accounts are typically non-federated, IT and Security teams have to come up with a solution for provisioning, authentication, access policies, compliance, and more. Administering these accounts involves a lot of manual work, which leaves these accounts often under-managed and over-privileged.

The Okta Platform allows you to take control of non-federated accounts across your organization by implementing strong authentication and access policies to bolster least privilege.

One use case that demonstrates this is securing service accounts for SaaS applications. Within Okta Privileged Access, admins can gain visibility of shared SaaS application accounts, implement policies, vault passwords, and properly govern to reduce misuse. 

NHI credential reuse is another item in OWASP’s risk list. Reusing the same passwords is an old, dated practice that is simply not sufficient for today’s threat landscape. Many organizations are moving to passwordless environments, but some legacy tools, systems, and applications will always require traditional credential management. 

For these, it’s important to implement a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution that allows the Security team to set controls around credential use — who can use a password, when, and for what — and automatic credential rotation after use. Okta Privileged Access allows you to implement these security controls for any account, key, or secret stored and managed within. Automatic credential rotation allows you to rest easier knowing that if a credential is leaked, it is already outdated.

Looking ahead: strengthening NHI security with Okta

OWASP’s Top 10 NHI Risks reminds us that safeguarding non-human identities isn’t optional — it’s necessary. From addressing improper offboarding to preventing secret leakage and enforcing least privilege, organizations must adopt proactive strategies to secure these critical accounts.

Okta’s solutions, including the OIN, ISPM, Workflows, and Privileged Access, provide a robust framework to tackle these risks head-on. By integrating automation, real-time monitoring, and granular access controls, Okta empowers you to reduce complexity, improve operational efficiency, and enhance your organization’s security posture at scale.

Explore how Okta can help your organization stay ahead of the curve by connecting with our experts or trying our solutions today.