Because API keys, tokens, and certificates behave like identities with privilege, scope, and revocation needs. If they are hardcoded, copied into CI/CD, or left unrotated, attackers can reuse them like standing credentials. Governance should cover ownership, expiration, rotation, and offboarding so secrets are managed as lifecycle-bearing access artifacts, not static configuration.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Application secrets often look like simple configuration, but operationally they behave like credentials with a lifecycle. A token, API key, or certificate can grant broad access, persist across environments, and remain valid long after the original deployment context changes. That makes them an identity security problem, not just a DevOps hygiene issue. The governance question is whether each secret has a clear owner, defined purpose, expiry, and revocation path, which is exactly the kind of discipline reflected in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0.
The common mistake is treating secrets as static application inputs instead of privileged access artifacts. Once a secret is copied into source control, embedded in a build log, or distributed across multiple pipelines, it becomes difficult to know where it lives or who can use it. That creates exposure during incident response, because the security team may have to assume compromise without being able to enumerate the blast radius quickly. The governance model should therefore include registration, inventory, rotation, monitoring, and decommissioning, just as it would for a non-human identity.
Current guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 reinforces that these artifacts need explicit ownership and lifecycle control. In practice, many security teams discover secret sprawl only after a pipeline failure, leaked repository, or token misuse has already exposed production access.
How It Works in Practice
Managing secrets like non-human identities starts with classification. Each secret should be tied to a service, workload, pipeline, or integration, and the business function that depends on it. That means recording where it is used, what permissions it carries, which system issues it, and how it is rotated or revoked. For higher-risk environments, this also means separating short-lived credentials from long-lived secrets and preferring federation or workload identity where feasible.
Operationally, the control model should cover the full lifecycle:
- Assign an owner who can approve use, rotation, and revocation.
- Inventory all secrets across code, CI/CD, containers, and runtime environments.
- Set expiration where supported, and rotate on schedule or on incident trigger.
- Limit scope so each secret only reaches the minimum required system or API.
- Monitor for misuse through logs, SIEM correlation, and anomaly detection.
- Retire unused secrets and remove them from repositories, images, and secret stores.
This is where NHI governance and identity security converge. A certificate used by a workload, a cloud access token, and a service account credential all create a form of machine access that should be reviewed for necessity and blast radius. If a secret can impersonate a workload or unlock downstream systems, then its governance should be treated as part of privileged access management and not as a one-time configuration task. The practical goal is to make every secret discoverable, attributable, and revocable, even when it is issued by automation rather than a human administrator.
Controls become fragile when secrets are hardcoded into build artifacts, distributed to ephemeral containers without central inventory, or reused across multiple services because rotation then breaks dependencies that were never documented.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter secret governance often increases operational overhead, so organisations must balance faster delivery against stronger control over machine access. That tradeoff is especially visible in high-velocity CI/CD environments, where developers want frictionless deployments but security teams need expiry, rotation, and traceability.
There is no universal standard for every environment yet, particularly where legacy systems cannot support short-lived credentials or automated rotation. In those cases, best practice is evolving toward compensating controls such as network restriction, tighter logging, and segmented access paths. Secrets with certificates may also require different handling than API keys, because renewal is often tied to trust anchors and external dependencies. The governance model should reflect that difference instead of forcing a single rotation cadence onto all artifacts.
Intersection with NHI becomes most important when a secret is the only thing distinguishing a workload from an attacker. If that secret is shared, embedded in multiple services, or reused for convenience, the identity boundary disappears. Where the environment supports it, workload identity, ephemeral credentials, and centralized secret brokers reduce that risk, but the answer is not purely technical. Ownership, review, and offboarding remain necessary because compromised secrets are still identities in practice, even when they are stored outside a human account system.
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 NIST CSF 2.0, NIST AI RMF and NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-1 | Secrets governance depends on assigning and managing access to systems and data. |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | Application secrets function like machine identities with lifecycle and ownership needs. | |
| NIST AI RMF | If secrets support AI services, governance must cover trust, provenance, and access risk. | |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | SC-7 | Zero trust limits the damage when a secret is exposed or reused. |
| MITRE ATT&CK | T1552 | Adversaries commonly seek credentials and secrets from code, files, and systems. |
Track each secret as an access path and restrict use to approved systems and owners.
