Clutch Principles for Mastering Non-Human Identity Security
Clutch’s First Principles for Addressing Evolving NHI Security Challenges
Understanding the problem is only the beginning; the real value lies in developing solutions that not only address the symptoms but resolve the root causes.
Clutch’s principles tackle the unique challenges of securing and managing NHIs, going beyond traditional approaches that often fail to address their complexity and specific requirements.
These principles drive Clutch’s approach and product strategy, ensuring that enterprise security teams gain a robust, value-driven solution to enhance their security posture.
Rotation Creates a False Sense of Security
While secret rotation is often hailed as a security staple, even frequent rotations may leave gaps, and ultimately fail to prevent determined attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities within the rotation intervals.
Traditional secret rotation doesn’t effectively prevent misuse and leaves security gaps
Rotating secrets frequently (e.g., every hour) is impractical and cumbersome
Complexity and overhead can overwhelm security teams and create friction
The Clutch Approach: Zero Trust Principles and Ephemeral Identities
Clutch empowers security teams to extend the same Zero Trust approach they use for their human identities to their NHIs by continuously monitoring and validating NHI usage, and facilitate the transition to ephemeral identities - all to ensure airtight security.
Minimize Attack Surface
Prevent attackers’ unauthorized access - even if NHIs are compromised.
Optimize Operational Efficiency
Replace tedious rotations with minimal effort and zero overhead.
Enhance Team Autonomy
Empower security teams to work independently, without relying on IT, engineering, or DevOps support.
Clutch research shows attackers move at machine speed, rendering rotations ineffective! PDF Report
Zero Trust
Never Trust, Always Verify
Clutch empowers security teams to extend the same Zero Trust approach they use for their human identities to Non-Human ones, by continuously monitoring and validating NHI usage. Even if an NHI is compromised, it remains unusable by attackers due to ongoing verification.
Compromised NHIs give attackers extended access, increasing the potential and magnitude of damage
Validated Access to Reduce the Attack Surface Clutch enables continuous verification of NHIs usage, ensuring only trusted entities an access your critical assets.
Ephemeral Identities
Adopt Ephemeral Identities to Reduce Risk
Clutch enables security teams to transition from static, long-lived NHIs to ephemeral, auto-expiring identities. This shift dramatically reduces exposure to windows, limiting risk in the event of a compromise - enhancing security while simplifying operational complexity.
Static, long-lived credentials remain vulnerable until they are manually changed or invalidated
Clutch empower you ro use roles or federation to dynamically manage access, ensuring credentials are temporary and secure.
It’s All About Trust
NHIs can often be used from anywhere with little guardrails in place, making it essential to establish a trust level with the entities that use them.
NHIs often operate without adequate restrictions or context, leaving gaps in security
Limited ability to establish trust with systems and processes using NHIs increases risk exposure
Fragmented by nature, NHIs are challenging to secure effectively across environments
The Clutch Approach: Establishing Trust with Every NHI Consumer
Clutch applies a Zero Trust model to secure and validate all NHI interactions, boosting operational security and resilience across the enterprise.
Enhanced Security
Clutch establishes trust with each NHI consumer, ensuring secure operations in dynamic and complex environments
Contextualized Validation
Clutch attributes and contextualizes every NHI usage for accurate verification and protection
Trust-Based Access
Clutch enforces access controls to minimize the risk of NHI misuse from unverified sources
A Vault is Just Secure Storage
Vaults are essential for preventing secret sprawl by storing secrets, keys, and other NHIs. However, they only manage what they store and lack the intelligence needed to detect misuse or provide full context around NHI usage.
Vaults securely store NHIs but lack visibility, context and insights into those stored or used outside their scope
Vaults have no analytics or anomaly detection for NHI usage
Vaults are unable to prevent the misuse of stored NHIs
The Clutch Approach: Complete Visibility of NHIs and Their Usage
Clutch goes beyond secure storage by providing full visibility and real-time analytics into NHI usage, enabling proactive, contextualized risk identification and mitigation.
Full Visibility
Clutch tracks NHIs inside and outside vaults with contextual insights (who, where, and how they are used)
Smart Analytics
Clutch delivers actionable insights to identify and address risks in real time
No misuse
Clutch detects and prevents misuse with a Zero Trust and Ephemeral approach, continuously monitoring NHI usage
Security Teams Shouldn’t Be Dependent on Other Teams
Security teams often rely on IT and Engineering to implement crucial security controls, which creates friction and dependency. This reliance detracts other teams from their core responsibilities and lowers overall business efficiency.
Security teams often depend on other departments (IT & Engineering) to implement security controls
This dependency stalls incident response and weakens risk management efforts
Relying on other teams can slow security measures, creating gaps in protection.
The Clutch Approach: Empower Security Teams to Act Independently
Clutch enable security teams to implement and manage controls and without relying on other departments, by adopting a Zero Trust approach and embrace ephemeral identities. It enables to efficiently elevating security posture while streamlining security operations and reduce operational overhead.
Independent Action
Clutch enables security teams to implement controls independently, reducing friction and reliance on other teams
Streamlined Operations
Clutch elevates operational efficiency with pre-built automated workflows that accelerate response times and minimize delays
Direct Control
Security teams can directly implement, monitor, and manage controls, reducing bottlenecks and improving overall security
Identity-focus Instead of Infrastructure-focus
Traditional security tools, like CSPM and SSPM, focus on specific infrastructures but fail to address the dynamic nature of NHIs. While these tools offer detailed visibility in isolated environments, they lack the capability to secure NHIs as they move across diverse platforms.
Security solutions traditionally target specific infrastructures (cloud, SaaS) rather than focusing on identities
This approach overlooks the complexity of NHIs, which dynamically traverse multiple environments
Security policies are applied inconsistently as NHIs shift between contexts, leaving security gaps
The Clutch Approach: Shift Focus to Holistic NHI-focused Security
Clutch redefines NHI security by shifting the focus from infrastructure to identity, delivering a holistic approach that transcends environment-specific controls and ensures consistent security across all environments.
Holistic Protection
Clutch focuses on the dynamic nature of NHIs, securing them as they move across multiple platforms and contexts
Unified View
Clutch provides a comprehensive visibility of NHIs across the entire enterprise landscape Cloud, SaaS, code repos, CI/CD pipelines, data centers and on-prem environments
Consistent Security
Clutch ensures NHIs are secured consistently, no matter the environment they operate in