# Topic
10 articles on this subject.
When an agent acts on behalf of a user it inherits that user's access, so your half-governed pile of human permissions becomes agent attack surface. Why agent blast radius starts upstream, with people, and how to right-size both sides of the identity ledger.
Every Microsoft Graph, Entra SDK and Agent 365 SDK call needed to give a containerized LangChain agent its own identity, access control and audit trail, in the order they have to be made, and why.
The AWS, Microsoft Graph, Entra SDK and Agent 365 SDK calls that give an agent on Amazon ECS and Amazon Bedrock a Microsoft Entra identity, access control and an audit trail in Purview and Defender, in the order they have to be made, and why.
A recorded owner who left the company. A dormant identity nobody measures. A directory-role admin that reads as "scoped." Non-human identity assessment keeps mistaking a value being present for a control being satisfied — and a false green is worse than a red.
I pointed nhi-scan at a real Entra tenant with 614 non-human identities. The 80:1 ratio became a worklist — and the top finding was a false positive: 53 "long-lived secrets" that were really 1. What a real NHI scan reveals, and why context beats raw counts.
Running my NHI tool against a real 600+ identity Entra tenant exposed three things unit tests missed: it didn't run on Windows, the enriched scan took 40 minutes, and it mistook managed identities for stored secrets. The fixes — including a 20x speedup — and why dogfooding matters.
Buried in a Microsoft Graph reference is a list of permissions that cannot be granted to an AI agent identity at all. Read backwards, it's the first enforced authority model for agents — six prohibitions worth applying to every agent platform you run, not just Entra.
An AI agent's reach is the one thing that can grow without anyone touching the identity — give it a new tool or connector and its blast radius expands while privilege, credential age, and owner all look unchanged. Here's why point-in-time posture scans miss it, and how to close the gap.
A practitioner control framework for governing non-human and agentic identities: eight principles, a four-tier risk model, thirty-five controls across eight domains, an agentic threat model, and a maturity model — mapped to OWASP NHI Top 10, NIST AI RMF, CSF 2.0, and 800-53.
Non-human identities are the enterprise's largest and least-governed identity population, and AI agents just added autonomy to the problem. Here is why the next identity crisis is already here — and the discipline that answers it.