OWASP NHI Top 10 – NHI Reuse
Overview
NHI Reuse refers to the repeated use of a single non-human identity—such as a service account, API key, or cloud credential—across multiple applications, services, or environments. While convenient, this practice creates significant security risk by broadening the potential blast radius if that identity is ever compromised.
What Is NHI Reuse?
Non-human identities (NHIs) are essential for system-to-system authentication and automation. However, when the same NHI is shared across different applications or workloads, a single compromise can affect every connected system.
For example, reusing an API key between two microservices means that if one service is breached, the attacker gains access to both. This breaks the principle of least privilege and complicates incident response, making it harder to isolate and contain threats.
How Does NHI Reuse Work?
NHI reuse often arises due to convenience or misconfigured deployment automation. Common examples include:
- Shared Kubernetes service accounts across pods
- Identical AWS IAM roles or Azure credentials reused in multiple services
- API keys used by several applications or environments
Each of these practices expands the attack surface and increases the difficulty of managing credentials effectively.
Why Does NHI Reuse Matter?
Reusing NHIs may seem harmless, but it significantly increases lateral movement opportunities for attackers. If one service is breached, the shared credentials allow access to other systems—bypassing environment isolation or app-level security.
According to the CSA NHI Report, organizations struggle with identifying credential owners, and 14% of them identify consumer-level NHI tracking as a top need. Moreover, recent incidents (like the .env file breach) have shown how shared credentials can snowball into widespread access compromise.
Astrix’s Solution for NHI Reuse
Astrix helps security teams detect and eliminate dangerous reuse patterns through:
- Discover Non-Human Identities with metadata linking each NHI to specific workloads or environments
- NHI Governance to tag and isolate identities by purpose, ownership, and scope
- Detect Suspicious Non-Human Activity including multi-context usage by a single identity
- Reduce your non-human attack surface by enforcing one-to-one NHI assignment and least privilege access policies
This ensures credentials are scoped properly, reused identities are remediated, and new risks are proactively flagged.
Call to Action
Still sharing credentials across your stack? See Astrix in action to eliminate NHI reuse and enforce least-privilege access at scale.
Learn more about the OWASP NHI Top 10 framework in Astrix’s introduction to the standard → Introducing the OWASP NHI Top 10.