OWASP NHI Top 10 – Overprivileged NHI
Overview
Overprivileged NHIs are non-human identities—like service accounts, tokens, or automation users—that are granted excessive permissions beyond what they actually need. This violates the principle of least privilege and creates critical attack vectors when these identities are compromised.
What Is an Overprivileged NHI?
NHIs play a foundational role in SaaS and cloud automation, enabling systems to interact programmatically. However, because assigning permissions is often rushed or imprecise, NHIs frequently end up with admin-level or broad access across cloud accounts. If any such identity is compromised, it provides attackers with high-impact capabilities, from lateral movement to data exfiltration or full environment takeover.
This issue commonly affects service accounts, API keys roles, and machine credentials, especially in cloud-native applications where misconfigurations go unnoticed.
How Does an Overprivileged NHI Work?
Attackers typically need initial access first—via secret leakage, phishing, or a vulnerable app. From there, if they compromise an overprivileged NHI, they can:
- Access or exfiltrate sensitive data from cloud storage
- Escalate privileges or impersonate other services
- Install malware or create persistence mechanisms
- Gain admin control over entire environments
Examples include EC2 instances with full AWS Admin rights, OAuth apps granted write privileges unnecessarily, or service accounts with permissions across unrelated environments.
Why Do Overprivileged NHIs Matter?
Overprivileged NHIs are silent threats. According to the CSA NHI Report:
- 33% of organizations flagged them as a top NHI risk
- 37% of NHI incidents stemmed from overprovisioned access
- Over 50% of service accounts are believed to be overprivileged
In a world of increasingly connected systems, failing to right-size access permissions opens the door to devastating breaches—many of which go undetected until significant damage has occurred.
Astrix’s Solution for Overprivileged NHI
Astrix helps organizations regain control over identity permissions by:
- Discovering Non-Human Identities and mapping their current permission sets
- Highlighting identities with excessive privileges using real-time behavioral analytics
- Reducing the non-human attack surface by flagging and remediating overprovisioned NHIs
- Integrating NHI governance policies to enforce least-privilege access automatically
Additionally, Astrix supports detecting suspicious non-human activity and integrates with IAM tools to implement Just-in-Time access and preventive guardrails—helping teams enforce secure practices without sacrificing automation.
How many of your NHIs have admin rights they don’t need? Reduce your non-human attack surface and right-size permissions with Astrix—before attackers find the ones you’ve missed.
Learn more about the OWASP NHI Top 10 framework in Astrix’s introduction to the standard → Introducing the OWASP NHI Top 10.