They should manage them as a shared control plane. Secrets, service accounts, and pipeline credentials should be inventoried alongside application assets, with rotation and revocation tied to ownership. That prevents code changes from creating undocumented access paths and helps IAM teams see where machine identity risk begins.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Code security and nhi governance overlap wherever software needs non-human access to cloud platforms, source control, CI/CD, APIs, or internal services. That makes the question less about two separate disciplines and more about one control surface: how code is authorised to act, what credentials it uses, and who can revoke them. The practical risk is that application teams often treat secrets as implementation details while security teams treat them as identity objects, creating gaps in inventory, ownership, and response.
That gap matters because exposed tokens, hard-coded certificates, and over-permissioned service accounts are frequently the fastest path from a code issue to environment-wide compromise. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is useful here because it pushes teams to connect governance, asset visibility, access control, and incident handling rather than managing them in silos. In practice, many security teams only discover the overlap after a pipeline credential has already been used outside its intended path, rather than through intentional shared governance.
How It Works in Practice
Organisations should map code-facing identities into the same governance model used for human access, but with controls that reflect machine speed and automation. A service account used by an application, a deploy token used by CI/CD, and a secret injected into a runtime environment all need clear ownership, documented purpose, and lifecycle controls. That means inventorying them alongside applications and repositories, not in a separate spreadsheet owned by a single team.
Operationally, the best practice is to connect the software delivery lifecycle to identity control points:
- discover secrets and service accounts during code scanning, pipeline checks, and cloud posture reviews;
- assign an accountable owner for each non-human identity and rotate credentials on a defined schedule;
- tie revocation to change management, incident response, and decommissioning events;
- restrict use by environment, workload, and privilege level, so a build credential cannot become a production admin path;
- monitor for abnormal use patterns and alert on access from unexpected repositories, runners, or hosts.
This is also where OWASP guidance on insecure secrets handling and application risk aligns with NHI governance, even when the implementation sits inside engineering workflows. The most effective controls are those that reduce manual exception handling: short-lived credentials, automation-backed rotation, and revocation triggers that do not depend on a human remembering where a secret was copied. Current guidance suggests treating code-to-cloud identity paths as part of the attack surface, not as operational plumbing that can be left outside security review. These controls tend to break down when credential creation is fully decentralised across ephemeral build systems because ownership and revocation become ambiguous.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter credential governance often increases delivery overhead, requiring organisations to balance developer velocity against assurance and traceability. The tradeoff is real: aggressive controls can frustrate release engineering, but loose controls create silent access paths that survive long after the code they support has changed.
There is no universal standard for this yet, so organisations usually adapt the control model to the environment. In cloud-native estates, short-lived workload identities and policy-as-code can reduce secrets sprawl, while legacy systems may still depend on long-lived service accounts and static configuration files. In those cases, the immediate objective is not perfection but visibility, ownership, and compensating controls.
Edge cases also appear when one pipeline deploys across multiple tenants, when third-party integrations require shared credentials, or when AI-assisted development introduces new automated actors into the delivery chain. In those scenarios, code security and NHI governance should be reviewed together, because the question is not only whether the code is safe, but whether the identity attached to that code can be constrained, audited, and revoked quickly. CISA guidance is useful for adapting this to operational response and asset visibility, especially when credentials are discovered outside normal governance channels.
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, NIST AI RMF and NIST AI 600-1 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | ID.AM-1 | Inventories must include non-human identities and code-access credentials. |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | The question is fundamentally about governance of non-human identities in software delivery. | |
| NIST AI RMF | GOVERN | Shared governance is needed where automation and AI-assisted coding expand identity risk. |
| NIST AI 600-1 | GenAI-enabled development can create new credential and workflow risks in the pipeline. |
Inventory service accounts, secrets, and pipeline credentials with the same discipline as other critical assets.
