03 — agents & architecture

Non-human identity

Also written NHI

An identity used by software rather than a person — a service account, API key, OAuth token, certificate or workload identity — usually backed by a secret the program presents as its credential. Non-human identities typically outnumber human accounts, often have no owner or expiry, and are what an AI agent actually acts with when it calls a cloud API or a SaaS tool.

Sources

OWASP Non-Human Identities Top 10 ↗

Related terms

Agent identity Agents & architecture
The identity an AI agent's actions are attributed to and authorised under. Most agents today act as the developer who launched them, or with a shared key…
Decoy credential Defence & response
A credential that looks real but is never used by any legitimate process — a fake API key, cloud key or token placed where an intruder or a misled agent…
Confused deputy Attack concepts
A classic security problem, dated 1988, that agents reproduce almost perfectly: a privileged component is tricked by a less-privileged party into misusing…

Agents & architecture

Where the attacks above actually land. The vocabulary here is worth precision, because the difference between "the model decided" and "the tool ran" is the difference between a risk and an incident.

Non-human identity is term 15 of 16 in this part of the glossary.

AI agent Agent host Tool call MCP Tool registration PreToolUse hook Action layer Memory / cross-agent propagation Context window Agent hook Inference hooks MCP gateway Model proxy Agent sandboxNon-human identityAgent identity

This page is one entry from the agentic AI security glossary, which defines 82 terms in the same style. Where a term belongs to a published taxonomy or standard — the HackAgent attack families, the OWASP lists, AMTSO's guidelines, MITRE ATLAS, ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act, W3C Trace Context, the MCP specification — the authoritative wording is the source document's, not ours, and specifics should be verified there. "Lethal trifecta" is Simon Willison's term. OWASP® is a trademark of the OWASP Foundation; ATT&CK® and ATLAS™ are trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Naming a framework here is description, not a claim of certification or endorsement.