Machine Identities Outnumber Humans 82-to-1 in Cloud Environments, Posing Major Risk

Machine identities such as IAM roles, service accounts, and CI/CD tokens now outnumber human users 82-to-1 in modern cloud environments, making them the leading attack vector for cloud breaches, according to CyberArk's 2025 Machine Identity Security Report. Unlike human accounts, these identities lack multi-factor authentication, access reviews, and centralized oversight, allowing excessive permissions to accumulate undetected over time. A common real-world example involves OIDC-federated CI/CD pipelines granted unrestricted AWS administrator access with no branch-level trust restrictions, meaning a single compromised pipeline could expose an entire cloud account. Existing security tools largely focus on human identity governance and static audits, leaving machine identity trust chains, blast radius analysis, and cross-platform visibility unaddressed. To fill this gap, a developer built an open-source platform called MII that discovers, maps, risk-scores, and simulates attack paths for machine identities across AWS accounts and CI/CD pipelines, while also providing compliance checks and AI-powered remediation guidance.