What is a Machine Identity?

What is a Machine Identity?

A machine identity refers to the unique identity assigned to non-human entities, such as servers, devices, applications, containers, bots, or other digital components. Managing Machine Identities effectively is crucial for authenticating and validating interactions between machines and ensuring that only trusted devices, services, or applications can access specific systems, services, or data. If left unverified and unprotected, malicious actors can compromise machine identities and create outages and disruptions to critical services within an organization’s IT ecosystem.

Principal Factors to Consider in Managing a Machine Identity

Understanding Digital Credentials: Machine identities are often represented through digital certificates, cryptographic keys, or API tokens that authenticate machines in a network or system.

Automation Capabilities

Machine identities are used for automated processes, such as systems communicating with one another or APIs interacting with services.

Lifecycle Management

Similar to managing how human identities secure interactions between people, machine identities require lifecycle management through their relationship with the organization. Organizations must implement processes and policies to initiate, maintain, and delete machine identities securely and efficiently. These processes include:

• Provisioning: Assigning the identity when a machine is deployed.
• Authentication: Verifying the machine’s identity during communication.
• Deprovisioning: Revoking the identity when the machine is decommissioned.

Lifecycle management processes also ensure that if a Machine Identity is compromised, a potential malicious actor will only have limited access to systems. The security boundary that these processes create adds an “identity perimeter”, an additional layer of security to augment traditional security defenses such as firewalls and intrusion prevention systems.

Access Controls

Machine identities enable enforcing the Principle of Least Privilege access for machines, ensuring they access only the resources necessary to perform their functions.

Governance

An Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution ensures that the use of machine identities complies with security policies and regulatory requirements and provides auditing and reporting capabilities.

Why Managing Machine Identities is Critical for IGA

Enhances Security

If improperly managed, hackers can misuse machine identities and create hidden encrypted communication tunnels on enterprise networks and gain privileged access to sensitive resources. Forged or exfiltrated Machine Identities can enable an intruder’s machine to disguise itself as an authorized machine and gain exposure to sensitive data. Securing Machine Identities prevents unauthorized access by malicious or compromised machines.

Facilitates Audits and Compliance Reporting

Helps meet regulatory requirements for managing all identities in an organization.

Enables Scalability

Many organizations provision and de-provision machines at a high velocity. Effective Machine Identity management supports secure automation in large-scale cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments and IoT.

Examples of Machine Identities

• A server authenticating itself to a database using an SSL/TLS certificate.
• A microservice calling another service via an API, secured with an OAuth token.
• IoT devices identifying themselves to a central management system using unique credentials.

Where to Get Help

Protecting Machine Identities effectively prevents unauthorized access and mitigates the threat of data breaches. A modern Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution provides an environment for organizations to establishing policies, controls, and systems to discover, authenticate, and monitor every Machine Identity that interacts with their IT infrastructure.

See how Omada Identity Cloud ensures consistent and secure management of all identities, both human and non-human, in any organization’s IT ecosystem.