When should manufacturers prioritize passwordless access?

Manufacturers should prioritize passwordless access when passwords, badge sharing, or repeated logins are creating friction and reducing accountability. In connected environments, stronger authentication is most valuable where physical entry and system access overlap, because it lowers the chance that a single compromised secret can affect both operations and security.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Passwordless access is not just a convenience upgrade in manufacturing. It is a control decision about how identities move between shop-floor terminals, shared workstations, privileged systems, and connected production tools. When passwords are reused, shared, or written down, accountability collapses and the same secret can unlock both physical and digital pathways. That is especially dangerous in environments where a single operator session may touch MES, PLC-adjacent tooling, maintenance portals, and remote support.

The broader NHI problem is that shared credentials and weak lifecycle management tend to create hidden privilege. NHI Mgmt Group notes that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, broadening the attack surface in ways traditional access reviews often miss, as discussed in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs. While that statistic is about non-human identities, the operational lesson translates: if access is not bound tightly to a person, device, and purpose, it becomes hard to prove who did what and when. OWASP also treats identity hardening as a core control area in the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10.

In practice, many security teams encounter password sharing and delayed revocation only after a production incident or audit finding has already exposed the gap, rather than through intentional access design.

How It Works in Practice

Manufacturers usually get the most value from passwordless access in high-friction, high-impact workflows: shift handoffs, shared kiosks, maintenance consoles, contractor access, and remote support into operational systems. The goal is to replace shared or remembered passwords with stronger authentication that proves both identity and device trust, then issue access only when the person is in the right context.

Current best practice is to pair passwordless login with MFA, device posture checks, and least privilege. That means a technician taps a badge, uses biometrics, or authenticates with a hardware-backed credential, and the system then evaluates whether the request should be allowed based on role, location, time, asset criticality, and session history. NIST’s digital identity guidance supports phishing-resistant authentication for stronger assurance, while zero trust principles push decisions toward continuous verification rather than one-time perimeter trust. For manufacturing environments, this becomes much more effective when access is tied to named users and managed endpoints instead of shared terminal accounts. The broader identity lifecycle issues seen in NHI governance are covered in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks.

A practical rollout often starts by replacing passwords on shared stations, then extending to privileged maintenance paths and remote access. Teams should also map where human authentication and machine credentials intersect, because those junctions are where compromise spreads fastest. The strongest implementations treat authentication as one part of a broader access workflow, not a standalone login project. For policy baselines, manufacturers can align with NIST SP 800-63 Digital Identity Guidelines and use NIST SP 800-207 Zero Trust Architecture to keep trust decisions contextual.

These controls tend to break down when legacy OT applications only support shared local accounts or when remote vendors require unmanaged access paths that bypass centralized identity controls.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter passwordless control often increases rollout complexity, requiring organisations to balance stronger accountability against legacy compatibility and operator workflow disruption. That tradeoff is real in plants that run older HMIs, kiosk-based access, or vendor-maintained systems that were never designed for modern identity enforcement.

Not every environment should move all at once. In some cases, passwordless should begin with privileged access, shared terminals, and high-risk remote support before it reaches every operator login. If biometrics are used, privacy, fallback, and recovery processes need to be defined up front. If hardware keys are used, lost-device handling and break-glass procedures matter just as much as the login itself. Best practice is evolving, but the direction is consistent: reduce shared secrets, shorten session risk, and make access accountable at the point of use. That is also why organisations should benchmark against the 52 NHI Breaches Analysis when evaluating how quickly weak credentials turn into operational exposure.

In mixed IT and OT estates, passwordless succeeds where the identity layer can distinguish people, devices, and services cleanly. It is less effective when authentication is modern but downstream authorisation still depends on static shared accounts, because the weakest account path remains the easiest path.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• Why do ephemeral credentials still leave risk in machine access models?
• Should organisations prioritize JIT access before more dashboards?
• Should organisations rely on passwordless authentication to solve access risk?
• What is the difference between passwordless authentication and password-based access?