Dwayne McDaniel
Dwayne has been working as a Developer Advocate since 2014 and has been involved in tech communities since 2005. His entire mission is to “help people figure stuff out.” He loves sharing his knowledge, and he has done so by giving talks at hundreds of events worldwide. He has been fortunate enough to speak at institutions like MIT and Stanford and internationally in Paris and Iceland. Dwayne currently lives in Chicago. Outside of tech, he loves karaoke, live music, and crochet.
Sessions
A lot of security boils down to trusting both humans and machines to access resources using the same flawed pattern: long-lived credentials. What if we rethought application and workload 'identity'?
Non-Human Identities (NHIs) like service accounts, bots, and automation now outnumber humans by at least 45 to 1, and are a top target for attackers. Their rapid growth has outpaced traditional security controls, and simply securing secrets is not enough; attackers exploit blind trust in tokens and credentials every day. With the release of the OWASP Top 10 Non-Human Identity Risks in 2025, we finally have clear guidance on where the biggest threats lie and how to prioritize remediation.
But OWASP isn't alone, industry experts agree: NHI security is an urgent, organization-wide challenge that goes far beyond IT. Shadow IT and AI-powered automation are accelerating the problem, making strong identity governance and access management (IAM) essential. Developers need to understand the risks, leverage the latest best practices, and advocate for a holistic approach to NHI security. By raising awareness and driving governance across teams, we can start to control the chaos and protect our organizations as NHIs continue to proliferate.