They create risk because they widen trust beyond what teams can directly see or govern. When service accounts carry broad rights and tokens move between systems with weak oversight, compromise can spread across third and fourth party dependencies. That combination undermines accountability, increases lateral movement opportunities, and makes it harder to prove whether access was appropriate at the time.
Why Overprivileged Service Accounts and Tokens Create Outsized Supply Chain Exposure
Cloud supply chains are built on delegated trust: applications, build systems, integrations, and partner services all authenticate through service accounts and tokens. When those identities carry broader rights than they need, a single compromise stops being a local incident and becomes a path through shared pipelines, storage, deployment tooling, and downstream environments. The risk is not only theft of data; it is the erosion of control over who can act, on which system, and under what conditions.
That is why the problem is so persistent in cloud environments. Teams often understand the application they own, but not the full chain of systems that can reuse the same token or inherit the same permissions. NHIMG research on the 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity reports that 44% of NHI tokens are exposed in the wild and 60% of NHIs are overused, which shows how quickly delegated access can outgrow governance.
In practice, many security teams discover the blast radius only after a token has already been copied into logs, tickets, code, or another integration path.
How This Fails in Practice Across Cloud Pipelines
Service accounts and access tokens are meant to be narrow, time-bound proof that a workload may act on behalf of something else. The risk rises when they become long-lived, shared, or difficult to trace. A build system may store a token that can reach production. A third-party integration may inherit write access it never truly needs. A token may work across multiple cloud services, which makes revocation slower and incident scoping harder.
The main failure pattern is privilege accumulation. As automation expands, teams often grant a service account access “for convenience,” then reuse it across jobs, regions, or applications. Over time, that turns one credential into a reusable trust bridge. If the token is exposed, an attacker does not need to break the cloud provider itself; they only need to use the standing authority already granted to the workload. That is why short-lived credentials, explicit scoping, and workload-specific identities matter more than manual approval chains after the fact.
Current guidance suggests treating every token as a capability with a blast radius, not as a harmless implementation detail. Controls such as just-in-time issuance, secret rotation, and separate identities for each integration help, but they only work when teams can answer three questions: what the token can reach, where it is stored, and how quickly it can be revoked. The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is useful here because it frames overprivilege, lifecycle failures, and secret exposure as first-class machine-identity problems rather than generic access issues.
That model breaks down when credentials are embedded in opaque vendor workflows, copied between many SaaS tools, or reused by multiple applications without clear ownership.
Where the Risk Becomes Hardest to Control
Tighter token governance often increases operational overhead, so organisations have to balance speed of delivery against the cost of tighter identity hygiene. The hardest cases are not simple internal workloads; they are cloud supply chains with many third-party dependencies, shared CI/CD runners, or partner-managed integrations where the original issuer no longer has strong visibility.
One common edge case is cross-environment reuse. A token created for testing may later be copied into production automation because it “already works.” Another is inconsistent offboarding, where a service account remains active after the application that owned it has changed hands or been retired. NHIMG’s research also notes that 91% of former employee tokens remain active after offboarding, which is a reminder that lifecycle failure is often the real control gap, not initial issuance.
There is no universal standard for every cloud and SaaS combination, but the practitioner rule is consistent: if a token can authenticate to more than one critical system, or if nobody can quickly prove its owner and scope, it is already beyond acceptable governance. In those environments, the issue is not just exposure; it is that the organisation can no longer confidently reason about trust boundaries.
Risk and Threat Considerations
Overprivileged service accounts and unsecured access tokens create a material exposure because they turn a single credential leak into broad unauthorized access across integrated services. The threat is especially acute in supply chains, where one compromised integration can become a stepping stone into upstream or downstream systems that were never meant to be directly reachable.
Failure mechanism: Attackers commonly exploit reused, long-lived, or weakly monitored tokens by extracting them from code repositories, logs, chat systems, tickets, build output, or memory, then using the granted permissions to enumerate resources, move laterally, or persist through legitimate automation paths.
Impact: The result can be data exfiltration, service tampering, fraudulent API activity, hidden persistence, and loss of audit confidence because actions appear to come from a legitimate workload rather than an obvious attacker account.
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 MITRE ATT&CK address the attack and risk surface, while CIS Controls v8 and NIST CSF 2.0 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 | Directly addresses exposed and overused machine credentials in supply chains. |
| NHI-02 — Overprivileged Non-Human Identities | Targets excessive permissions on service accounts and API tokens. | |
| Recommendation — Inventory and rotate service-account secrets, then eliminate shared long-lived tokens. Reduce each NHI to least privilege and remove cross-environment access. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | 6 — Access Control Management | Applies to controlling and reviewing privileged access paths for accounts and tokens. |
| 5 — Account Management | Fits lifecycle governance for service accounts, token ownership, and offboarding. | |
| Recommendation — Review and revoke unnecessary account permissions and stale access paths. Track ownership, expiry, and offboarding for every service account and token. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA — Identity Management, Authentication, and Access Control | Covers authentication and authorization governance for cloud access tokens. |
| Recommendation — Enforce identity-bound access and validate privileges before granting system access. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | T1552 — Unsecured Credentials | Matches attacker theft and reuse of exposed access tokens and secrets. |
| Recommendation — Hunt for exposed credentials in code, logs, and collaboration tools. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to prioritise: Start with tokens and service accounts that can reach production, cross-tenant data, deployment pipelines, or secret stores. Those are the credentials that most often create disproportionate blast radius and the hardest recovery problem if exposed.
What to verify: For each high-value service account, verify the actual owner, the minimum required permissions, the systems it can authenticate to, and whether the token can be rotated without breaking dependent automation. If any of those cannot be answered quickly, treat the identity as under-governed.
Decision rule: If a credential is shared by multiple applications, has no clear expiry, or is stored in more than one location, move it into a short-lived model and separate the identity by workload before expanding the automation further.
Practitioner takeaway: The real control objective is not to eliminate machine-to-machine trust, but to make every delegated action narrow, attributable, and revocable before compromise turns convenience into systemic exposure.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- Why do service accounts create so much access governance risk?
- Why do service accounts and API keys create so much supply chain risk?
- Why do static service accounts create so much breach risk in cloud environments?
- Why do service accounts and access tokens create more breach risk than human accounts?
