Domain framework
D09 · Non-Human Identity (NHI)
Identification, authentication, authorization, lifecycle management, and governance of non-human principals across enterprise environments.
Key knowledge areas
NHI Fundamentals
- Non-Human Identity Definitions
- Identity Subject vs Account vs Credential
- Human vs Non-Human Identity
- NHI Classification
NHI Subject Categories
- Service and Integration Identities
- Application Identities
- Database Application Accounts
- Workload and Microservice Identities
- Infrastructure Identities
- Machine and Device Identities
- API Client Identities
- Automation and CI/CD Identities
- AI Agent Identities
NHI Lifecycle & Governance
- NHI Discovery and Inventory
- Identity Ownership
- Provisioning and Decommissioning
- Entitlement Management
- Orphaned Identities
- Shared Identities
- NHI Governance
NHI Authentication & Credentials
- Service Account Credentials
- API Keys
- Machine Certificates
- Short-Lived Credentials
- Secrets Management
- Credential Rotation and Revocation
- Credentialless and Federated Authentication Models
NHI Security
- Excessive Privileges
- Credential Exposure
- Identity Misuse
- Ownership Gaps
- NHI Security Monitoring
Career alignment
- TRACK A — Identity Platform & CIAM Engineering: Core domain. View track
- TRACK B — Enterprise IAM / PAM / IGA Engineering: Core domain. View track
Suggested learning outcomes
- Inventory workload and database identities with accountable owners.
- Design credential issuance, rotation and revocation.
These prompts are editorial learning aids retained from the earlier textbook. They are not additional requirements in v0.4.
Connected questions
- How should a DevOps engineer reach production?
- Who owns the identity connecting to your database?
- When an AI agent acts, whose authority does it use?
Build competency evidence
Explain a mechanism, analyze an implementation or failure, build a tested lab, and justify an architecture. Keep shared technical explanations in the Knowledge Base and link to them from research.
Domain name, scope, knowledge areas and representative technologies follow the authoritative Framework v0.4. Questions may span multiple domains.