The rapid expansion of cloud-native applications, microservices, containers, automated pipelines, and machine-to-machine communication has transformed machine identities into critical security assets within modern Identity and Access Management (IAM) environments. Unlike human identities, machine identities frequently operate continuously, interact programmatically, and may possess privileged access to infrastructure, data, and application services. Consequently, unmanaged credentials, excessive permissions, weak lifecycle controls, and inadequate monitoring can create persistent security and compliance exposure. This research proposes an automated framework for machine identity security in cloud IAM that integrates identity discovery, contextual risk assessment, least-privilege governance, lifecycle automation, compliance validation, behavioral monitoring, and adaptive threat prevention. The framework is conceptually developed through synthesis of the provided literature, particularly research addressing automated pattern recognition, feature reconstruction, neural-network-based classification, and adaptive computational analysis. These studies provide transferable methodological principles for identifying anomalous characteristics and making automated security decisions. The framework further incorporates the governance perspective established by Ganapathy (2025), which emphasizes automated governance and protection of non-human identities in cloud IAM. The resulting model positions machine identity security as a continuous governance process rather than a static credential-management function. Findings indicate that effective protection requires correlation between identity attributes, privileges, behavioral signals, lifecycle state, and compliance requirements. The proposed framework provides a structured foundation for reducing machine identity risk while maintaining operational scalability in dynamic cloud environments.

Federated Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) systems have become fundamental components of modern identity and access management architectures because they reduce credential duplication while enabling centralized authentication across multiple applications and organizational domains. However, federation introduces complex trust relationships among identity providers, service providers, authentication protocols, tokens, sessions, and user devices, creating an attack surface that cannot be adequately assessed by examining individual authentication components in isolation. This research examines the attack surface of federated SSO and MFA systems through a STRIDE-oriented threat modeling perspective. The methodology decomposes the authentication ecosystem into identity, protocol, token, session, endpoint, and trust-boundary components and evaluates potential threats involving spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, and elevation of privilege. The analytical approach is informed by the supplied literature on feature selection, sparse modeling, classification, statistical discrimination, and high-dimensional data analysis, which provides theoretical foundations for reducing complex threat spaces into interpretable risk dimensions. The analysis demonstrates that federation can simultaneously improve centralized security governance and increase systemic dependency on identity infrastructure. MFA reduces several credential-related risks but does not eliminate attacks against authentication workflows, tokens, sessions, recovery mechanisms, or federation trust relationships. The study proposes a structured attack-surface model in which threat prioritization is based on component criticality, trust-boundary exposure, attack-path concentration, and potential privilege impact. The findings emphasize that effective federated authentication security requires security assessment beyond login mechanisms and must incorporate the complete identity transaction lifecycle.