Detect and Prioritize Issues with Natoma

Proactive Security: Automated Issue Detection for Non-Human Identity Management

As organizations scale, they inevitably incorporate more and more non-human entities (API tokens, OAuth tokens, service accounts) into their technology stacks. Non-human identities enable automated pipelines for seamless software deployment, integration with external platforms that power new feature sets, and even the general management of engineering infrastructure. With cloud adoption accelerating and software interconnectedness increasing, it’s clear that NHIs are here to stay. That means it’s critical to inventory and secure them.

But, as is often the case, the seemingly simple task of listing all NHIs in a given system is, in reality, extremely complex in practice. Security teams can painstakingly think through all of the automated processes supporting software deployments, test suites, dashboard integrations, etc. in that system to create an inventory of their NHIs… yet still, they may be overlooking the orphaned tokens created once for testing, API keys over-permissioned with admin privileges, and perhaps a service account powering a critical deployment pipeline that’s tied to an engineer’s GMail account. In an organization with intricate org charts and team interdependencies, manually tracking non-human entities as they’re created, used, and removed is almost impossible. 

This is where automated issue detection comes in. Rather than relying on manual tracking or leaving security to chance, an automated system can help proactively manage your NHIs—alerting you to potential issues before they turn into problematic security risks. 

Clarifying and Prioritizing NHI Management with Natoma

Natoma’s platform discovers NHIs upon connecting to a service, and utilizes system metadata to deduce risky scenarios. In the platform, the Issues page surfaces and prioritizes NHI-related risks that require attention. Here, users have a prioritized view of scenarios on which they need to take action, and a central control plane from which to start tackling tasks to remediate any open issues.

Each issue is prioritized based on its severity, helping your team quickly focus on the most pressing issues. These issues are flagged in two key categories:

1. Urgent Issues

These issues require immediate attention and may include:

• Key Rotations: When an API key or OAuth token is expired or needs to be rotated, Natoma will raise an issue, as this requires immediate action to prevent outages.

• Deactivated Accounts: Natoma will identify when keys or tokens are tied to deactivated accounts, since this can cause integrations to break.

2. Proactive Issues

These are issues that can be addressed before they become critical, such as:

• Over-Permissioned Credentials: Natoma highlights credentials with more privileges than necessary, allowing you to rightsize permissions and minimize the impact of a potential breach.

• Inactive or Forgotten Keys: Flag keys that haven’t been used in a while so you can review them and decide if they should be revoked or deleted, reducing the attack surface.

With Natoma’s simple, centralized dashboard, you can stay on top of your NHIs, reducing the chances of security gaps due to overlooked issues from unmanaged NHIs.

Staying one step ahead

The automated discovery of NHIs and the detection of issues helps enhance an organization’s security posture by securing mismanaged credentials, simplifying internal audits of NHIs, and ensuring compliance. Teams can adopt and integrate services powered by NHIs, with more confidence and focus, now that their NHIs are managed with minimal manual intervention.

To learn more about how Natoma can help you detect issues and provide detailed steps to remediate them, contact our team.