Accountability should sit with the team that owns identity and access governance, not with individual users alone. API tokens are credentials and should be issued, stored, rotated, and revoked under policy. Security teams should require least privilege, inventory all active tokens, and define who can enable integrations that create new identity or email handling pathways.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
API tokens that connect privacy tooling to account workflows are not convenience settings; they are non-human credentials with real access scope. When those tokens can create, modify, or read identity and email handling pathways, accountability must sit with the function that governs access, not with the person who clicked “connect.” That distinction matters because token misuse can quietly expand into data access, workflow abuse, and offboarding gaps.
Current guidance from NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and NHI research on lifecycle control points to the same conclusion: these tokens need owner assignment, inventory, rotation, and revocation as part of formal governance. NHIMG’s NHI Lifecycle Management Guide treats tokens as managed identities, not ad hoc app settings. In practice, teams get this wrong when integration sprawl is approved by business users first and reviewed by security only after a token is exposed or an account workflow behaves unexpectedly.
How It Works in Practice
The operational model is straightforward: the identity and access governance team owns the policy, while the application or privacy platform owner may request the integration and provide business justification. Security should define who can create tokens, which scopes are acceptable, how long they may live, and what logging is required. Tokens should be issued under least privilege, stored in approved secret handling systems, rotated on a schedule, and revoked immediately when the integration changes or the owning process is retired.
This is especially important because API tokens often outlive the user or project that requested them. NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs emphasizes lifecycle ownership, and that model aligns with NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls on access enforcement and accountability. A practical control set usually includes:
- a named system owner for every token
- approved scope boundaries tied to the specific workflow
- vaulting or secret manager storage instead of inline configs
- event logging for token creation, use, and revocation
- periodic review for dormant, duplicated, or overprivileged tokens
That operating model reduces the risk seen in incidents like the Salesloft OAuth token breach, where a compromised integration became a path into downstream systems. It also reflects NHIMG’s finding that 91% of former employee tokens remain active after offboarding, which shows how often lifecycle ownership fails when token accountability is left informal. These controls tend to break down in low-code automation environments where business users can self-enable integrations faster than governance can review the resulting access path.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter token governance often increases friction for product teams, so organisations have to balance speed against exposure. The tradeoff is real: privacy platforms, account workflows, and customer support automations often need legitimate machine-to-machine access, but that access still needs clear ownership and revocation authority.
Where guidance is still evolving, current best practice is to treat user-granted OAuth access, service account tokens, and platform api key as distinct risk classes rather than applying one blanket rule. For higher-risk workflows, many teams are moving toward short-lived credentials and just-in-time approvals, but there is no universal standard for that yet. The key point is that the business requester is not the token owner unless policy explicitly says so; ownership should remain with identity governance, with operational execution delegated to platform admins under review. NHIMG’s State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 and the 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity both show how quickly unmanaged tokens spread across collaboration tools, tickets, and offboarding gaps. Organisations that rely on manual approvals or informal ownership tend to discover the problem only after a token has already been reused, duplicated, or left active beyond its intended purpose.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and CSA MAESTRO address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0, NIST SP 800-63 and NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | Token rotation and revocation are core NHI lifecycle obligations. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-01 | Identity and credential governance supports accountable access management. |
| NIST SP 800-63 | Credential assurance principles inform how non-human tokens should be issued and protected. | |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | PA-1 | Zero Trust requires continuous verification of machine-to-machine access. |
| CSA MAESTRO | Agent and workflow governance applies to integrations that trigger account actions. |
Use strong issuance, binding, and lifecycle controls for tokens that act as identities.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- Who is accountable for protecting self-service account creation and authentication workflows?
- What breaks when organisations do not track where machine tokens and API keys are used?
- Who should be accountable for secure eID access when cloud platforms connect identity, account management, and APIs?
- Who is accountable when a shadow account or unmanaged non-human identity is used to bypass controls?
