● Agentic & Non-Human Identity Security · Microsoft
Raj Penchala
Securing non-human and agentic identities — where identity meets AI.
Machine identities outnumber humans 82:1 — and AI agents just added autonomy. I secure them.
Latest articles
RSSWhat 614 Non-Human Identities Taught Me — and the False Positive That Almost Cried Wolf
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.
Making an NHI Scanner Production-Ready: What a 600-Identity Run Taught the Tool
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.
What an AI Agent Must Never Be Allowed to Do
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.
MCP Triage: Turning Scanner Noise Into a Six-Item To-Do List
MCP security scanners are smoke alarms that go off every time you make toast — one audit found 21 of 27 alerts were false. mcp-triage is the layer that sits on top of any scanner and sorts the noise into the handful that matter, then governs the fleet against the OWASP MCP Top 10.
Drift Detection for Agent Identities: When Reach Grows and the Tier Doesn't Move
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 Control Framework for Non-Human & Agentic Identity
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.
The Non-Human Identity Reckoning — and Why Agents Make It Urgent
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.
Understanding Azure AI Foundry Agent Identities, Blueprints, and Entra ID Object Relationships
A practical identity architecture guide for security, governance, and troubleshooting
AI Red Teaming for M365 Copilot & Bing Chat Applications
These applications fall into two distinct layers — each requiring different red teaming, and both are required.
The MDASH Blueprint: Defence at AI Speed
A visual blueprint of MDASH — Microsoft's Multi-Model Agentic Scanning Harness — an autonomous system that discovers, validates, and proves software vulnerabilities at AI speed. The system, not the model, is the product.