How should security teams secure break glass accounts without making emergency access fragile?

Security teams should use cloud only emergency accounts, register two hardware backed passkeys, and keep the accounts excluded from policies that could block access during an incident. The goal is to preserve unimpeded recovery while reducing password risk. Keep the keys stored separately, document the recovery process, and test it regularly so the account remains usable when normal authentication paths fail.

Why Break Glass Access Fails When It Is Treated Like Ordinary Admin Access

break glass account exist for the moment when normal identity controls are unavailable, so they need a different balance of resilience and restraint than everyday privileged accounts. If they are protected too tightly, they become unusable during an incident; if they are protected too loosely, they become a standing back door into critical systems. The practical challenge is preserving emergency reachability without turning the account into a permanent exception that nobody can govern well.

That is why teams usually separate break glass design from standard privileged access management. Emergency accounts should be rare, clearly owned, and isolated from policy layers that could lock them out during a directory outage, conditional access failure, or tenant-wide identity incident. Current guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is useful here because it frames emergency access as a lifecycle and exposure problem, not just an authentication problem.

In practice, many security teams discover break glass fragility only after the recovery path they trusted is already the thing that has failed.

How to Design Emergency Access So It Still Works During an Incident

The core design principle is to reduce the number of assumptions the account depends on. A break glass account should not rely on the same single sign-in path, policy engine, or enrolled device fleet that may be impaired during a tenant compromise or identity provider outage. Using cloud-only emergency accounts with hardware-backed passkeys gives teams a way to preserve strong authentication while avoiding password reuse, password resets, and shared secrets that are hard to defend under pressure.

Operationally, the account should be excluded from controls that could block incident response, but only in a narrowly scoped and documented way. That usually means separating it from routine access policies, avoiding automatic disablement logic that would fire during a broader identity event, and storing the recovery authenticators in physically and administratively separate locations. The account also needs a tested restoration path: who can use it, how they prove the incident, where the keys are held, and what logs should confirm use afterward.

A useful way to think about the control is as a recovery instrument rather than a convenience account. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs is a helpful reference for the broader identity lifecycle discipline behind this approach, because emergency accounts still need inventory, ownership, and revocation logic even when they are intentionally exempt from normal day-to-day workflows.

Keep the account outside routine sign-in friction, but not outside governance.
Use hardware-backed authenticators instead of passwords where possible.
Store recovery materials separately so one compromise does not remove both keys.
Test the exact recovery path on a schedule, not just the account itself.

These controls tend to break down when emergency access is built on the same fragile identity assumptions as ordinary admin access, because the thing meant to restore control becomes subject to the same failure modes as everything else.

Where the Real Trade-off Lies Between Usability, Monitoring, and Abuse Resistance

Tighter break glass controls often increase the chance of lockout, so organisations have to balance emergency usability against the risk of silent misuse. The main trade-off is that the fewer gates you place in the recovery path, the more important logging, ownership, and review become afterward. That is especially true in environments where the account is intentionally excluded from some preventive controls and therefore relies more heavily on detective safeguards.

Best practice is evolving, but one principle is clear: a break glass account should not be treated as a hidden universal override. It should have a narrow purpose, explicit custodians, and a verification step that confirms the account is still usable without making it easy to trigger accidentally. In high-blast-radius environments, teams should also decide whether the account is for identity-plane recovery, workload-plane recovery, or both, because mixing those purposes usually makes the procedure harder to test and easier to misuse.

The strongest indicator of good design is not that the account exists, but that its use is rare, deliberate, attributable, and recoverable after the incident. When teams skip those checks, emergency access often looks safe on paper and fails in the exact condition it was created for.

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 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0, CIS Controls v8 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-01 — Secrets and Credential Management	Break glass accounts rely on emergency credentials and recovery authenticators.
	NHI-02 — Lifecycle and Ownership	Emergency accounts still need clear ownership, inventory, and revocation discipline.
Recommendation — Use short-lived, hardware-backed emergency credentials and remove password dependence. Assign an owner, document recovery steps, and review break glass access on a schedule.
NIST CSF 2.0	PR.AA — Identity Management, Authentication, and Access Control	The topic is about preserving privileged authentication while constraining access paths.
Recommendation — Separate emergency authentication from routine access policies and validate recovery access.
CIS Controls v8	6 — Access Control Management	Break glass accounts are privileged access paths that must be tightly governed.
Recommendation — Restrict emergency access to named custodians and review privileged account use regularly.
NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207)	SC-2 — Protect Asset	Emergency access should preserve control while minimizing trust in always-allowed paths.
Recommendation — Isolate the emergency path so recovery access remains limited and intentional.

Practitioner Guidance

What to verify: Confirm the account can still authenticate when the normal identity path is unavailable, but also confirm the recovery process is narrow enough that only the intended incident-response owners can execute it. Test the full sequence end to end, including where the hardware-backed keys are held, how access is granted, and what evidence is produced after use.

Decision rule: If a control can block the account during a tenant outage, identity compromise, or policy-engine failure, do not rely on it for break glass access. Treat that dependency as a design flaw, not a hardening win, because emergency access has to survive the failure conditions it is meant to remediate.

What practitioners underestimate: The hardest part is not issuing the account; it is keeping it both usable and governable over time. Break glass accounts drift when people forget to test them, rotate the associated authenticators, and reassess whether the exclusions still match the current incident model.

Practitioner takeaway: A good break glass account is intentionally boring during normal operations and reliably usable during failure, which means resilience must be engineered without creating an invisible privilege path.