Securing AI agents and non-human identities in enterprises

20 NHI and AI agent risk vectors you need to know

We’ll dive deep into the top 20 risk vectors affecting non-human identities and AI agents, spanning everything from orphaned credentials and secrets sprawl to prompt injection and insecure plugin integrations. You’ll learn how attackers exploit insecure defaults, over-scoped permissions, lateral movement, and weak isolation across services.

You’ll understand the major security risks, supported with examples from attacks, OWASP reports, and vulnerabilities discovered by security researchers.

Topics covered: Over-scoped permissions, orphaned NHIs, NHI authentication, secrets, 3rd party vulnerabilities, token reuse, lateral movement, multi-tenant data leaks

Strategies and principles for NHI governance

We’ll cover practical strategies for securing NHIs, starting with exposure assessment, setting measurable objectives, and aligning Zero Trust controls across architecture and teams. These are backed by 12 security principles and 35 implementation steps to drive NHI governance.

This section will provide you with the NHIs' security checklist, covering inventory management, credential isolation, least privilege, fine-grained access control, and externalized authorization, mapped to practical implementation steps.

Topics covered: Zero Trust Security, SPIFFE, WIMSE (IETF), SPICE (IETF), OpenID Connect M2M, FIDO Device Onboarding (FDO), NIST SP 800-207 Zero Trust Architecture

Vendor landscape and vendor evaluation checklist

Securing NHIs means aligning security controls across the entire identity lifecycle—from issuance to revocation. In this chapter, we break down how to evaluate vendors based on your architecture, maturity, and specific use cases. Rather than aiming for tool breadth, we show why depth, interoperability, and lifecycle fit matter most.

You’ll learn how to assess solutions for provisioning, rotation, access control, and policy enforcement in a way that supports scalable, Zero Trust NHI security.

Topics covered: NHI security architecture, automated identity issuance, scoped credential distribution,  policy enforcement at scale, NHI security tool landscape