Securing Machine-to-Machine Communications in the Age of Non-Human Identities

Abstract

The digital age of non-human identities The world of non-human identities is one that is predominated by digital actors that communicate, authenticate and exchange data without human intervention, and this is a result of rapid proliferation of connected devices, autonomous systems and application programming interfaces (APIs). With the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications now becoming the basis of operations in such industries as manufacturing, healthcare, transport, and smart cities, the safety of such communications is paramount. But existing identity and access management systems, developed to secure the access of human users, are inadequate in coping with the distinctive difficulties of the highly distributed, highly mobile, and short-lived machine identities.
This document will analyze these threats and others in the M2M communications and outline how the threats are evolving and this should be an eye opener especially to the security industry. It describes the existing technologies and protocols to authenticate and authorize the identities of non-humans, e.g., PKI, OAuth 2.0, and new decentralized identities frameworks and analyzes how these can perform in praxis. We also study the issues of machine identity management life lifecycle, scalability, and modeling of trust in the various heterogeneous environments. Lastly, future research directions coming out of the research area are also proposed upon AI-driven anomaly detection, zero trust architectures, and decentralized identity governance to further consolidate machine-to-machine security foundational structures.