Flexible Electronics Market Report 2025-2033: New Revenue

The problem with always-on machine access

Ever wonder why we give machine identities keys to the kingdom that never expire? It’s like leaving your front door wide open and then being shocked when someone just walks right in.

The reality is that most organizations are drowning in "standing privileges." These are permanent permissions assigned to service accounts or vms that just sit there, waiting to be exploited. According to CyberArk, this "always-on" access is a massive risk because it lets attackers move sideways through your network once they've popped a single credential.

• Excessive Permissions: Most machine identities have way more power than they actually need for their daily tasks. (The Human & Machine Identity Blur — Why Your Non-Human 'Users ...) In finance, a reporting bot might have full write access to a database when it only needs to read.
• Lateral Movement: Hackers love static credentials. If they compromise a web server in a retail environment, they can use those "always-on" apis to jump straight into the payment processing layer.
• Zero Visibility: When access is permanent, it's hard to tell what's "normal" vs. "malicious." JIT fixes this by creating a paper trail for the "request and justification" phase. Since static credentials just exist, there's no record of why they're being used, but JIT logs every single request before it even happens.

A 2025 update from Microsoft points out that management ports like rdp or ssh are prime targets for actors hunting for open doors. If these ports stay open 24/7, you're basically asking for a brute-force attack.

So, how do we stop this cycle of permanent risk? We need to talk about moving toward a model where access only exists when it's actually needed.

What exactly is Just-in-Time Machine Access?

So, what is JIT for machines anyway? Imagine giving a contractor a key to your house that only works on Tuesday between 2:00 and 4:00 PM—that is the heart of it.

jit access means we stop handing out "forever keys" to our apis and workloads. Instead, we create a system where privileges are born, live for a few hours, and then basically self-destruct. According to CyberArk, this is the best way to enforce "zero standing privileges" because if there is no active account, there is nothing for a hacker to steal.

It’s about being surgical with permissions. Here is how it usually breaks down:

• Ephemeral Accounts: You create a "ghost" identity on the fly. For example, a healthcare app might trigger a one-time service account to migrate patient records, then delete it the second the data move is done.
• Temporary Elevation: Think of a retail bot that usually only reads inventory. During a "Black Friday" surge, it gets write access to update stock levels, but only for that specific window.
• Dynamic Secret Generation: Instead of opening firewall ports—which is a bit old school—modern jit focuses on issuing short-lived tokens. A central system validates a request and hands out a token that expires in 60 minutes, so the machine can do its job and then the access just vanishes.

A blog post by Entro Security notes that non-human identities are growing way faster than human ones, making this automation a "must-have" rather than a "nice-to-have."

Honestly, it’s the only way to keep up with cloud scale without losing your mind over security audits.

Strategy and Process for JIT

So, you've decided to kill off your standing privileges—smart move. But honestly, implementing jit for workloads isn't just about flipping a switch; it is about changing how your machines actually talk to each other without making your dev teams want to quit.

Before you start enforcing policies, you gotta know what’s actually running in your clusters. I’ve seen so many projects stall because nobody knew which legacy service account was hardcoded into a critical finance app.

• Inventory your secrets: Use an automated tool to find every api token and ssh key hiding in your environment. You can't manage what you can't see, and trust me, there are more than you think.
• Define RBAC and Conditions: You need to set up Role-Based Access Control (rbac). This basically means you group permissions into "roles" instead of giving them to individual machines. In a jit context, you add "conditions"—like a retail inventory bot only getting "write" access if it's during a specific maintenance window.
• Automate the lifecycle: If you're manually approving machine requests, you’re doing it wrong. Integrate jit into your ci/cd pipelines so secrets are issued and revoked without human intervention.

It’s also worth checking out the Non-Human Identity Management Group, which provides frameworks for these exact scenarios. Their framework emphasizes "Lifecycle Management," which means you need a plan for how an identity is born, how it gets its jit permissions, and how it's eventually retired so you don't end up with "ghost" identities everywhere.

The Technical Architecture

So, how do we actually pull the trigger on this without breaking everything? While aws change manager is great for humans needing to access nodes, machine-to-machine jit is a different beast. For workloads, you're usually looking at things like aws iam Roles Anywhere or using the Security Token Service (sts) to get those sweet, short-lived tokens.

Here is the technical breakdown of the two main architectures:

• The Broker Model: This is the "vault" approach. A central system holds the root of trust. When a finance script needs to hit a database, it asks the broker; the broker generates a dynamic secret or a temporary token on the fly. The script uses it, and then the broker ensures it expires.
• The Elevation Model: This is great for those annoying backup scripts. Instead of giving them admin rights 24/7, the workload uses an api call to assume a more powerful role for a set period. Once the time is up, the session expires and the workload drops back to its basic, low-privilege state.

At the end of the day, moving toward zero standing privileges is just good architecture. It keeps your audits clean and your perimeter tight.

Key Takeaways for your JIT Journey:

• Audit First: You can't fix what you don't know exists. Find those hidden api keys.
• Focus on Tokens: Move away from static keys toward short-lived sts tokens.
• Automate Everything: If a human has to click "approve" for a machine, the system will fail at scale.
• Start Small: Pick one non-critical workload, move it to a jit model, and then expand.

Anyway, start small with one workload and you'll see it’s not as scary as it sounds. It's much better than waiting for a breach to realize your service accounts have too much power.