Machine Identity Management: The Nonhuman Side of Federal Zero Trust

How Can Agencies Know Their Active Machine Identities?

Emanuel Figueroa, senior research analyst for identity and access management security at IDC, says machine identities frequently outnumber human identities by an order of magnitude. This isn’t an isolated condition but reflects how modern environments operate.

“What tends to be missing is not raw visibility, but usable context tied to governance,” Figueroa says.

Service accounts often exist without clearly assigned ownership or lifecycle policies. API tokens created for temporary integrations persist beyond their intended use. Certificates are issued and renewed without consistent tracking of dependencies or criticality.

In cloud environments, workload identities are provisioned dynamically, often outside a centralized inventory model.

“What makes the problem difficult is not scale alone, but the fact that many machine identities operate with authority but without clear accountability,” he says.

How Can Federal Agencies Map the Machine Identity Surface?

Ron Bushar, managing director and CISO for Google Public Sector, says agencies should treat machine identity mapping as a continuous, automated discovery mission rather than a manual audit: “First, they should use automated tooling to scan code repositories, cloud environments and network traffic to catalog every active API, service account and token.”

Next, Bushar says, agencies need to tie every discovered machine identity to a human owner or specific application workload.

“Finally, it’s critical to migrate these entities away from local configuration files and into centralized secrets managers or enterprise identity providers where access policies can be universally enforced,” he says.

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What Are Principles and Pitfalls for Machine Privilege Access?

Least privilege means giving machine identities only the access required to perform a specific task for a limited time. Key principles include role-based access, segmentation, credential rotation and ongoing validation of behavior.

Smith cautions that common pitfalls include overprivileged service accounts, shared credentials or credentials that remain fixed for a long time, and a lack of ongoing monitoring.

“Agencies should treat machine identities with the same governance rigor applied to privileged human users,” he says.

He adds that effective least-privilege strategies should also incorporate identity-driven segmentation, ensuring machine identities communicate only with explicitly authorized services.

How Can Agencies Best Manage Credentials and Certificates?

To handle thousands of fast-expiring machine credentials without crashing mission-critical workflows, Bushar suggests that agencies embrace automated orchestration.

He cautions that relying on manual spreadsheets to track TLS/SSL certificates can lead to catastrophic, unexpected network outages, and recommends that agencies use the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol to issue, renew and revoke certificates automatically.

“Furthermore, agencies should condense traditional 90-day lifecycles into short-lived, ephemeral tokens that expire in minutes or hours, which renders stolen credentials useless to an adversary,” he says.

Smith adds that federal agencies need automated credential and certificate lifecycle management, noting that manual processes cannot keep pace with the scale of modern hybrid and AI-enabled environments.

“This is especially critical in DevSecOps pipelines, where machine identities used for automation and software delivery must be governed, rotated and monitored to reduce the risk of supply chain compromise,” he says.

How Does Continuous Monitoring Support Machine Identity Security?

Alexandra Rose, global head of government affairs at Sophos, says continuous monitoring is what keeps machine identity security effective over time: “These environments change constantly as new workloads, credentials and connections are created.”

Without ongoing visibility, she adds, organizations and businesses can overlook misconfigurations, outdated credentials or unusual behavior, creating blind spots that attackers can exploit.

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Continuous monitoring helps machine identity security operate as part of a broader zero-trust model, Figueroa says.

“Without it, controls tend to remain static and point-in-time,” he says. “Continuous monitoring effectively turns identity governance into a feedback loop, where access, risk and response remain continuously aligned.”

How Do Officials Align Machine Identity Governance to Zero Trust?

Bushar says agencies can align their governance programs with White House directives (such as OMB M-22-09) and evolving CISA guidance by formalizing NHIs under the Federal Identity, Credential and Access Management framework.

“Machine identity governance must be elevated to the same level of rigor for compliance as human identity,” he says.

This means establishing explicit, auditable policies for who owns a machine identity, automating its deprovisioning when a project ends, and tracking progress directly against the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model metrics for reporting and accountability.

For federal organizations, Rose says, the main point is that machine identity governance is not a secondary layer of zero-trust maturity to address later — it’s part of the foundation.

As agencies modernize and automate more of their environments, every unmanaged credential, overpermissioned service account or unmonitored certificate becomes a gap between policy and reality.

“Closing that gap is what makes zero trust durable, credible and operationally meaningful,” Rose says.