Token Security CEO Itamar Apelblat on Securing Non-Human Identities in the Age of AI Agents

Hey guys. Thanks Ro. We're here with Inmar, apple Blatt, who is the CEO of Token Security, and we're having a little chat about AI agents and non-human identities.

'cause well, we've been trying to manage these things before and we're not so good at it, and it might get worse before it gets better. Inmar, welcome to show. Hello.

Nice to be here. Walk us through this a little bit, but I think people can understand the idea that there are these non-human identities, there are machines, there's software applications, there's more than, than there are humans. And now it looks like we're moving and exponentially increase them with the number of AI agents.

Is that a fair assessment of what we're looking at? Oh yeah, absolutely. Today by the way, we have 98% of our identity, uh, infrastructure is our non-human identities.

So it's one to 50. The ratio between human and non-human now that, uh, CEOs and board members asking for, uh, security team to adopt agents and have this AI transformation, the amount of non-human identities of ident that are meant automation gonna go even more. And we, we already seeing it happening in, in a lot of our customers environment.

Yeah. So it also seems to me that we're not very good at managing them as they are. So how are we gonna manage 'em when there's gonna be exponentially more of them soon?

Or are we prepared? Yeah, yeah. I think that, uh, right now, uh, uh, the piece, uh, we have a lot of solutions for human identities when it comes to non-human.

Um, we, we overlooked that for a while and cloud and our AI really created an acceleration of the amount of identities. So the first biggest, like, I think that the first challenge is understanding, uh, and, and gaining visibility into those identities, right? Knowing about them, knowing about the risk, and then also understand who is accountable for that.

You have an AI agent who is responsible for that. Uh, so I think those are the first few gaps that you want to tackle. And then also understand how, how to support those, those identities in scale, manage their lifecycle, and, uh, and improve their security posture.

Mm-hmm. Is the risk level gonna be higher? Because, at least as far as I understand it, a lot of these AI agents are going to be somewhat autonomous, and if somebody compromises them, they might take over an entire workflow.

Yeah, yeah. Um, the risk is, is is similar but also different when it comes to, uh, identities of, uh, of AI agents and, uh, agent ai. What we see is that one of the biggest challenges, so historically you have human identities and non-human or workload identities.

So for human, you have, uh, identities that running in a very low scale and taking, uh, actions. The permission is best based on their roles in the organization, right? Then you have workload identities that are deterministic.

It's very hard to predict what they're gonna do, but they're doing it in scale all the time. Now, AI agency is a bit of a combination of the two, right? It's on one hand, has the flexibility of a human, but then the scale and the robustness of, of, of identity.

And that create a, a, a, a much bigger challenge to, to manage and to, and to manage their boundaries and secure them. Mm-hmm. So what is your best advice to folks?

Because I also think people are kind of, at least historically, they had one platform for managing human identities and they had other platforms for non-human or, and does all that need to converge now when we have these hybrid identities that are sitting in the middle of it? Or are we gonna have a separate platform for the AI agents alongside the other platforms we're using for other identities? Yeah, so, um, my first advice, regardless to the type of a platform, is to really, um, gain, uh, before running into, um, creating architectures of how agents should interact with one another.

You need to understand what you have, you need to look and gain visibility into all of your agents gain, uh, uh, um, traceability into their actions. Logs collection is very important here. The other thing is try to separate between, uh, regular identities for human regular identities, for workloads, identities, and identities for AI.

Edges don't use singular identity for different actions from different workloads or operations. We see that today, quite often, that you see a human identity that an agent is running on their behalf. That's, that's really problematic when you want to manage those in scale.

So my, my first advice, gain visibility in what you have, have, uh, improve your log retentions and collection in order to gain traceability and adaptability. And the third part is, um, separate between the identities. So you will have a, a, a very good source of truth.

I also can't help but wonder how sophisticated these attacks might get in this regard. Um, today, cyber criminals will steal your credentials and pretend to be you, and they'll hang out for a while and they'll even start to look like insiders. Well, won't the same thing happen with AI agents?

Somebody will create a fake AI agent that may look legitimate for an extended period of time before somebody decides to actually, um, invoke it's more malicious capabilities. Yeah, yeah. That, that's a good point.

Look, today, uh, most attacks are identity based attacks, right? Hackers don't break in, they log in to also be with an, with, with agents. So I don't, I don't think that it'll, the first ways of attacks will be generating those new agents.

'cause you already have a lot of them. They're not monitored well enough and they're not secured. So threat actors now have like, uh, a real, um, good variety of types of identities that are mismanaged that they can, uh, uh, uh, take advantage of.

Mm-hmm. Um, are we waiting for some sort of cataclysmic event to occur before we have to get serious about this? It seems like, once again, there's an emerging technology and the cybersecurity folks are chasing after it again.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, look, uh, in, in the energized space, we see attacks happening all the time. And the market in the past couple of years started to, to, uh, um, be more aware of these challenges and, and, and have, uh, an architecture for that.

I, we are gonna see it part of, uh, agents as well. But what we need to consider is that the pace of adoption is just much faster than ever before. We see Fortune 500 that five months ago didn't have any agents and now have thousands of new agents that's running in their environment because every organization understand that this is, uh, um, um, a business enablement and, and that that could really help them succeed.

And also a competitive advantage. So we will see it, uh, um, uh, um, being adopted faster. The other thing that I want to mention is that we see a lot of times the security teams adopting agents for them to be more, uh, efficient.

So the awareness for, uh, threats and, and lifecycle management is a bit higher. I ju I don't think it'll be just from the incident perspective, that only then, uh, security teams will start, uh, uh, uh, look for that, uh, for a solution. They're already looking for that.

Mm-hmm. Um, will we need to update or maybe they already have, or the regulations and compliance frameworks that we see. I mean, we have things like HIPAA and all kinds of stuff that's out there, but, um, I don't think we're gonna write new regs, so we just need to update the ones we have for the age of AI agents.

Yeah, I, I, I, I agree. I think that that's, that's the way to go. There are, um, I, as I ISO and different compliance, uh, uh, and regulations that are well meant for managing, uh, a AI and securing ai.

But I do think that the, um, that the regular regulations that we're following should also consider a world, uh, organization adopting ai. 'cause it's already happening. Uh, and also giving tools for the auditors to actually validate some of those, uh, compliance, which I think, think it's, it is part of the problem when you don't have visibility to those agents, then how do you validate that you are following some of those compliance could be a bit tough.

So we need to update those. Alright. So what's that one thing you kind of see folks doing today that makes you just shake your head a little bit and go, folks, we might wanna be a little bit smarter than that.

Yeah, I, I, I, I think that, that on on one side we see organization that says, uh, uh, and security teams that say, you know what? I don't understand it threat. I don't, I don't want to, I don't allow any adoption of AI agents.

I actually, uh, uh, also as, as a CEO of a company, I feel that this is not the right approach. You do need to iterate fast and be, and allowing your business to move forward and support their migration and not just block them. On the other hand, we see some teams that are, it's really the wild, wild west and there is no any visibility into their agents.

And, and, and that's the other way. So there's always a spectrum and you want to be somewhere in the middle enable allowing your organization to move fast, but at the same time, um, um, um, um, have some philosophy and support the phases of their adoption and add controls as you're going, uh, uh, in your AI journey. The, my, I think that today, the biggest issue that I see for organization is using the same identity for multiple different, uh, actions consumers.

So you see both human and AI using the same identity and that just can create a, a, a chaos. Alright, and to your point, are we likely to see the rise of what we might call shadow AI agents? And might those shadow AI agents outnumber these so-called legitimate AI agents?

Is that where we're headed? Yeah, a bit similar to shadow it, right? You had, uh, uh, uh, uh, a decade ago, one of the biggest problem is that organization just adapted a lot of shape of forms of it.

That one part of the security visibility and part of their controls. We see that also with shadow ai, where organization are leveraging some AI agents, AI mechanisms, uh, that are not part of their, um, um, framework and how they wanna manage. So I think this visibility into those all types of ai, uh, agent is, is the first step to go.

All right. Yeah, folks, you heard here we're just beginning to understand the scope of the issue. And AI agents, if you don't have 'em in your organization already, they're coming and well, they're gonna be some of the richest targets out there.

So you might wanna think about how to secure them now. 'cause if you do it later, it might be too late. Inmar, thanks for being on the show.

Thanks, Mike. It was a pleasure. All right, back to you guys.