Manpages for Non-Human Identities

It describes a user, but not a human. It lists fields for identification, but no living body stands behind them. These are non-human identities—service accounts, automation agents, bots—that live inside your systems with the same access privileges as real people.

Manpages for non-human identities feel cold and exact. They tell you the syntax for creating, modifying, and deleting these accounts. They explain flags for expiration dates, permission scopes, and environment contexts. They warn about environment variables that can leak secrets if handled carelessly. They do not care if the entity represents a production cluster scheduler or an internal CI pipeline—what matters is how it is defined, its parameters, and its security boundaries.

In modern infrastructure, non-human identities dominate the workload. APIs call APIs. Jobs trigger jobs. Code deploys code. Each of these actions is tied to an identity, often documented in a manpage somewhere deep in the repo or on a server. These manpages are critical because they reveal the contract between your tooling and the system’s security model.

Parsing manpages for non-human identities means reading them like operational blueprints. You look for the command syntax: useradd, groupmod, setfacl. You look for authentication sections that document tokens, SSH keys, or federated credentials. You check permissions with exactness—limiting them to what the identity needs and nothing more. A single careless permission in a service account manpage can turn into a system-wide breach when exploited.

Veteran teams treat these manpages as part of software supply chain hygiene. They version-control them. They document every key rotation. They update descriptions when scopes change. They remove dormant accounts before they become ghosts with lingering access. Manpages for non-human identities are not static—they are living security agreements.

If your logs are full of unexplained actions, or your audit trails point to service accounts with vague documentation, you have a risk. The fix starts with complete, accurate manpages that define every non-human identity in play. This is how you track who—or what—really has their hands on your systems.

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