Machine identity mayhem: The volume, variety, velocity challenge

Machine identities—like the API keys, certificates, and access tokens that secure machine-to-machine connections—are swarming businesses. Yet, many teams still reach for manual tools while their systems overclock.

At the start of the year, I predicted the ratio of machine to human identities would likely soon tip past 100:1. As of mid-year, most organizations are clocking in at more than 80:1—and I’ve seen environments as high as 500:1. Add in the impending 47–day TLS certificate lifespan mandate, cloud-native acceleration, expanding identity ecosystems—and you’re not just facing the sheer volume of machine identities. You’re braving unseen variety. And velocity. Unrelenting, system-breaking velocity.

Security teams are already surrounded by spreadsheets, urgent tickets, and AI coding assistants pushing policy boundaries. Most aren’t thinking beyond even basic governance. They’re all about survival.

Welcome to Machine Mayhem—the only arcade where the game isn’t actually a game. Reality rewrites itself at Level 18; every cabinet’s rigged with a breach trigger, and pressing the wrong button doesn’t just end your run. It disrupts production.

The three Vs of machine identity don’t take turns

In Machine Mayhem, you’re not just taking on one boss, one level at a time. You’re trapped in the middle of a broken arcade with every cabinet blinking, buzzing, and demanding your attention at once.

• To your left? A Whack-A-Mole machine spewing API keys and service accounts.
• Behind you? Space Invaders, except every invader is an expired certificate or a misconfigured workload.
• Dead ahead? A glitched-out racing sim where you’re responsible for rotating secrets at machine speed. And the brakes are failing, so you either spin out or slam straight into a breach.

Volume, variety, and velocity don’t queue up politely. These machine identity challengers pile on, each one amplifying the other. While you’re trying to shut down a rogue SaaS API key, a new AI agent spins up—with full access, no less—and your system is already overdue for a certificate rotation you missed during last night’s sprint.

At this point, you’re doing more than just “playing” levels. You’re enduring simultaneous points of failure.

Level one: Volume—when scale becomes a swarm

Credential creep. What used to be an annoyance is now an existential risk.

We’re seeing machine identities multiply at an unsustainable pace—API keys, TLS certificates, SSH (Secure Shell) certificates, cloud access tokens, workload SPIFFE IDs. They’re being spun up and abandoned faster than most teams can track. And every new microservice, AI agent, and containerized deployment adds another name to the roster.

If you don’t have a discovery, lifecycle management, and decommissioning strategy, you’re stockpiling untracked access until something breaks. Or worse, until something breaks in.

In this level of the game, every identity you miss is a hidden vulnerability. And the longer it lingers, the more damage it can do.

Level two: Variety—managing a mix of identity types

There is no “one-size-fits-all” in machine identity security.

You’re managing a morphing, evolving fleet of identity types with different behaviors, expiration patterns, and privilege scopes. Some rotate daily. Others hourly. Some live in Kubernetes clusters. Others are embedded in AI agents that can act faster than your ticketing system can react.

Each needs different handling. Different context. Different rules of engagement.

Treat them all the same, and you’re playing a rhythm game with the wrong controller and lag you can’t calibrate. Best case? It slows you down. Worst case? It grants the wrong machine access to the wrong system—but no one notices until it’s too late.

Level three: Velocity—TLS certificate lifespans are shrinking fast

TLS certificate lifespans will shorten to 200 days in just a few months, starting in March 2026. Then, 100 days in 2027. And in 2029? Lifespans will be cut to 47 days.

All told, by the time the CA/Browser Forum’s phased timeline officially plays out, you’ll experience an eightfold increase in the number of TLS certificates your teams have to manage.

That means what used to be an annual checklist item is now a continuous loop.

And it’s not just TLS certificates picking up speed. Kubernetes, cloud instances, serverless functions, and edge workers are scaling at machine speed that humans can’t keep up with. Each uses one or many access tokens, TLS certificates, SPIFFE IDs, among others. Yet, many companies are still trying to work manually.

That’s not a strategy. That’s multiple speed runs at the same time, and you’re seven seconds from burnout.

Final bosses: Quantum computing and agentic AI rewrite the rules

And just when you think you have the game figured out, it changes. Again.

The most formidable opponent is quantum computing—the asteroid to supersede all other asteroids. It threatens the cryptographic trust model on which today’s data privacy is built. When it hits—and it will hit—it could crater the foundation of our digital economy.

Every certificate, every signature, every encrypted transaction? Potentially compromised.

Agentic AI, on the other hand, is already inside the arcade, autonomously making infrastructure changes in real time. You’re increasing your risk if you can’t assign, monitor, and revoke identities and secure their privileged access with modern session management and zero standing privileges (ZSP). And you’re left wondering: where’s the “kill switch” for AI?

Combined, these seemingly indomitable forces do more than challenge the playbook: they corrupt the engine and rewrite the rules mid-play.

You can’t out-patch this. You have to out-architect it.

Game over conditions: What happens if you don’t adapt

If you miss one credential renewal, you risk an outage. Miss two, and your incident response team is stuck scrambling at 2 a.m. Miss the entire shift happening under your infrastructure—at machine speed—and you could face more than that.

The statistics speak for themselves:

• 50% of organizations have experienced a breach tied to machine identities.
• 72% reported certificate-related outages, with some reporting multiple outages at weekly and monthly frequencies.
• Outages are costing, on average, $4 million a year.

With the right machine identity security strategy, you can completely change the game, building resilience instead of reacting to issues as they come.

From chaos to control: How to beat the machine identity game

There’s a reason most teams are overwhelmed. They’re playing Machine Mayhem with the default settings in nightmare mode. Manual processes, fragmented visibility, inconsistent policies, and legacy thinking that treat machine identities the same as human identities.

That doesn’t work anymore. You need automation that scales, discovery that doesn’t blink, and crypto-agile architecture built for velocity.

You don’t have to take on every boss at once. Conquer one level, then level up. Start where it hurts most—automate certificate issuance and rotation. Register identities to workloads so context isn’t guesswork. Layer in Zero Trust controls so every workload gets a unique and universal SPIFFE identity.

With machine identity security, you’ll feel like you’re grabbing the star in Mario.

It’s your ultimate power-up.

You’re already playing—now it’s time to win

Machine identity security isn’t something you can opt into anymore. You’re it. Whether you’ve planned for it or not. Whether you, Player One, are ready or not.

But here’s the great news. You can overcome every level of the volume, variety, and velocity gauntlet—today. And the sooner you start building an identity-first defense that plays for you, the faster your business wins.

Machine Mayhem doesn’t sleep. But now? You’ve got the experience points to win.

Kevin Bocek is senior vice president of innovation at CyberArk.

Bonus round: Ready to level up your machine identity security strategy? Tune in to Kevin’s Security Matters podcast episode, “Zero Trust, Zero Chill: Securing Machine Identity,” where he explores the real-world stakes of machine identity chaos—and how to win.