// GLOSSARY

Non-human Identity (NHI)

Identities with no person behind them: service accounts, application registrations, workload identities and automation keys. In modern cloud environments they outnumber human identities many times over, and this ratio keeps growing as automation increases. Three structural traits make them especially risky: they usually fall outside multi-factor authentication (MFA), their credentials (keys, tokens, certificates) are carried statically in code or configuration, and their lifecycle management is incomplete; a service account forgotten when a project ends can stay alive and privileged for years. From the attacker's side, when these three traits combine, an attractive target arises: they are numerous, weakly protected and unwatched. Moreover, when a non-human identity is seized, its behavior does not produce anomalies the way a human's would, which makes detection harder. Non-human identity management is therefore the fast-growing open flank of cloud security and an inseparable part of effective-permission and transitive-privilege analysis.