Ownership should sit with the team that can actually revoke the credential or delegation, not just the team that requested it. For NHIs and agents, that may include platform owners, application teams, and identity governance. If no one owns revocation, the access outlives the business purpose.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Offboarding machine access is not an admin cleanup task. It is a control point that determines whether a revoked employee, retired workload, or decommissioned agent can still authenticate, call APIs, or inherit delegation after the business reason has ended. In practice, ownership matters because the team that requested access often cannot revoke the underlying token, key, service account, or trust relationship. That gap is why lifecycle failures keep showing up in the findings highlighted by Ultimate Guide to NHIs and the lifecycle processes for managing NHIs.
The ownership question becomes sharper with autonomous systems. An agent may hold multiple credentials, rotate through delegated scopes, and chain tool calls in ways the original requester never sees. That makes offboarding a coordination problem across platform, application, and identity governance, not a single team’s ticket closure. Current guidance from the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 points toward accountable lifecycle control, but the operating model is still maturing. In practice, many security teams encounter stale access only after a service, token, or agent has already been reused outside its intended purpose.
How It Works in Practice
The cleanest ownership model assigns offboarding to the party that can actually complete revocation, then makes the requester accountable for initiation and verification. For NHIs, that often means platform owners disable the workload identity, application owners remove references and dependencies, and identity governance confirms the final state. For agents, it also means revoking delegated tool scopes, API keys, session tokens, and any downstream service credentials the agent can mint or inherit.
Operationally, offboarding should be tied to a lifecycle event, not a calendar reminder. A practical process includes:
- Triggering revocation when a workload is decommissioned, a model is retired, or an agent changes purpose.
- Revoking the primary credential plus any derived secrets, refresh tokens, and delegated grants.
- Confirming removal from secret stores, CI/CD variables, vaults, and automation scripts.
- Logging who performed revocation, what was removed, and what verification evidence exists.
For autonomous workloads, best practice is evolving toward workload identity rather than static shared secrets. That means the real owner is the team operating the identity plane, such as SPIFFE/SPIRE, OIDC-based service authentication, or a policy engine that evaluates access at request time. This aligns with the direction described in NHI Lifecycle Management Guide and implementation guidance from the CSA MAESTRO agentic AI threat modeling framework. In practice, many environments still rely on a requestor-owned model because revocation authority, vault access, and app configuration are split across different teams, which means offboarding breaks down in federated cloud estates with shared service accounts and loosely governed secrets.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter offboarding control often increases coordination overhead, requiring organisations to balance fast deprovisioning against operational continuity. That tradeoff is especially visible when a single NHI supports multiple applications, or when an agent uses inherited permissions that are difficult to unwind without service interruption. Current guidance suggests treating those cases as exceptions to be engineered out, not as reasons to leave ownership unclear.
The hardest edge case is shared or overused identity. When one credential supports many systems, no single application team can safely claim full ownership, which is one reason the 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity found that 91% of former employee tokens remain active after offboarding. That kind of persistence is more likely when revocation requires changes in multiple consoles, vaults, and deployment pipelines. For agentic systems, the problem is even harder because the agent may create short-lived sub-credentials, so offboarding must include both the parent identity and any active derived sessions.
The practical rule is simple: if a team cannot revoke it, it cannot own final offboarding. Ownership should be documented in advance, with a named fallback for cross-functional dependencies and an escalation path when an agent or workload spans product, platform, and identity boundaries. There is no universal standard for this yet, but the direction from OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026 is clear: lifecycle control must be explicit, not implied.
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 OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-07 | Offboarding of service accounts and keys requires explicit lifecycle revocation. |
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | AGENT-04 | Agentic systems need revocation of delegated tools, sessions, and inherited scopes. |
| NIST AI RMF | AI governance requires accountable lifecycle controls for autonomous systems. |
Use AI RMF governance processes to define ownership, escalation, and verification for offboarding.
