Just-in-time identity for APIs is becoming an IAM control gap

At a glance

What this is: This is an analysis of why APIs should be treated as identities and how just-in-time access can reduce standing risk by narrowing privileges and revoking them automatically.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and lifecycle programmes increasingly need to govern machine access with the same accountability, ownership, and revocation discipline used for people.

👉 Read Abnormal AI's analysis of API identity governance and just-in-time access

Context

APIs are no longer just technical interfaces. In many enterprises they operate as identities, with their own credentials, permissions, owners, and trust relationships, which means identity governance must extend beyond human users and into machine access.

The gap is that most IAM programmes still assume access is attached to a person who logs in, completes a session, and later gets reviewed. API keys, tokens, and service connections do not behave that way, so standing privilege and shared secrets can persist without the visibility that human-centric controls require.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams govern API access as a non-human identity?

A: Security teams should inventory APIs as identities, assign an accountable owner, and enforce lifecycle controls for issuance, rotation, expiry, and revocation. The goal is to make access explicit and reviewable rather than hidden in code, pipeline variables, or shared credentials. Without that discipline, machine access becomes unmanaged trust instead of governed identity.

Q: When does just-in-time access make more sense than standing API credentials?

A: JIT makes more sense when an API only needs access for a bounded workflow and the organisation can enforce temporary authorisation centrally. It is less suitable when teams rely on persistent integration shortcuts or cannot coordinate expiry and renewal cleanly. The decision hinges on whether the business process can tolerate temporary access without breaking reliability.

Q: What do organisations get wrong about machine secrets in CI/CD pipelines?

A: The most common mistake is treating secrets as deployment convenience rather than identity risk. When keys, tokens, and service accounts are embedded in pipelines, ownership becomes blurred and revocation becomes slower than development. That creates hidden trust paths that are hard to audit and easy to reuse across systems.

Q: How can teams tell whether API identity governance is working?

A: A working programme can answer who owns each API, why it exists, when it expires, and how it is revoked. It also produces clear evidence that privileged access is temporary where possible and that abnormal behaviour is detectable in real time. If those questions are hard to answer, governance is still incomplete.

Technical breakdown

Why API identity is different from human identity

An API identity is a non-human identity that represents a service, integration, or automation path. It authenticates with keys, tokens, certificates, or federated assertions, then acts continuously without interactive login flows. That means the control problem is not password hygiene or MFA friction. The real issue is whether the identity has a named owner, an explicit purpose, and a lifecycle that includes issuance, rotation, expiration, and revocation. When APIs are treated as plumbing, their trust relationships stay invisible and overbroad access becomes normalised.

Practical implication: catalogue APIs as governed identities, not just endpoints, and assign ownership before access sprawl becomes permanent.

How just-in-time access changes API privilege

Just-in-time access is a privilege pattern, not a new authentication model. Instead of leaving credentials active indefinitely, the system grants narrow permissions only when needed and removes them after use. For APIs, this reduces the blast radius of exposure because a compromised key or token has less time and fewer opportunities to be abused. It also changes the trust model from permanent entitlement to temporary authorization. The key architectural point is that JIT only works when issuance, scope, and expiry are enforced centrally rather than left to application teams.

Practical implication: use JIT to replace standing API privileges where operational workflows can tolerate temporary authorization.

Why CI/CD and shared secrets keep machine access invisible

CI/CD pipelines often accelerate delivery by embedding secrets, service accounts, and cross-team connections directly into build and deployment flows. That convenience hides who or what is calling which system, and it can blur ownership across engineering, operations, and security. The result is a trust perimeter that becomes implicit rather than measurable. Once machine identities are scattered across repositories, pipeline variables, and collaboration tooling, auditability drops and the organisation loses the ability to explain why a service has access at all.

Practical implication: push identity guardrails into pipelines and collaboration workflows so machine access is visible at the point of creation.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

API identity is now a primary governance surface, not a technical detail. The article’s core claim is correct in one important sense: APIs often carry more effective access than individual users, yet are still managed as interfaces rather than identities. That creates unmanaged trust relationships, especially where ownership, purpose, and revocation are missing. The governance conclusion is simple: if the identity is not named and lifecycle-managed, it is not truly governed.

Just-in-time access exposes the weakness of standing machine privilege. Standing API credentials create persistence, while JIT makes access temporary and task-scoped. That shifts the control discussion from “how do we protect a secret” to “why does the secret need to exist continuously at all.” In identity governance terms, JIT is strongest where it removes unnecessary permanence from machine access and narrows the period in which compromise can matter.

Shared secrets are the operational symptom of a broader accountability failure. When teams use long-lived credentials and ad hoc service connections to keep systems moving, they are usually compensating for weak lifecycle governance. The issue is not just secret sprawl. It is the absence of a stable owner, expiry discipline, and revocation path for machine identities. Practitioners should read that as a governance problem, not a tooling problem.

Embedding API controls into CI/CD is how identity governance becomes enforceable. Security guardrails in pipelines are valuable because they shift identity decisions earlier in the build and deployment process. That helps prevent machine access from being created without review, but only if security and engineering treat API identity as a shared governance domain. The practical takeaway is that identity policy must be present where machine access is created, not only where it is audited.

From our research:

• From our research: 15% of commit authors have leaked at least one secret in their contribution history, according to The State of Secrets Sprawl 2025.
• That same research found 38% of secrets incidents in collaboration and project management tools like Slack, Jira, and Confluence are classified as highly critical or urgent, which shows how machine access leaks now move through everyday workflow systems.
• For deeper lifecycle context, see Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs for how issuance, rotation, and revocation should be governed across machine identities.

What this signals

API identities will increasingly be governed as lifecycle objects, not static integrations. Teams that still manage machine access inside application tickets or pipeline exceptions will struggle to prove ownership, expiry, and revocation. The programme shift is toward explicit identity cataloguing, temporary access where feasible, and audit-ready accountability across engineering and security.

The practical pressure point is secrets sprawl. Once keys and tokens spread into CI/CD, chat, and collaboration systems, revocation becomes slower than exposure and the trust boundary is effectively everywhere.

For identity leaders, the next phase is not more visibility alone. It is enforceable control at creation time, where API identity is defined, provisioned, and constrained before it ever reaches production.

For practitioners

• Treat every API key as a governed identity Create an inventory of API keys, tokens, certificates, and service connections with an owner, purpose, expiry date, and revocation path. If an API cannot be mapped to a business function and accountable team, remove or quarantine the access until it can be justified.
• Replace standing machine privilege with task-scoped access Use temporary authorization patterns where the workflow allows it, so machine credentials are issued for a narrow purpose and revoked automatically after use. Reserve permanent access only for cases with documented operational need and explicit review.
• Move identity guardrails into CI/CD pipelines Add checks that block hardcoded secrets, unnamed service accounts, and overbroad permissions before deployment. Pair those checks with approval workflows so engineering cannot create new machine access outside governance controls.
• Build behavioural baselines for API activity Define normal call patterns, target systems, and time-of-day expectations for critical integrations. Alert on abnormal request volume, unusual destinations, or access outside the normal workflow, and ensure the response is explainable and auditable.

Key takeaways

• APIs create a machine identity problem when they are granted persistent access without clear ownership or lifecycle controls.
• Secrets exposure and shared credentials turn routine integrations into hidden trust paths that are difficult to audit and revoke.
• Identity teams should move API governance into lifecycle, CI/CD, and temporary-access controls before machine sprawl becomes systemic.

Key terms

• API Identity: An API identity is the governed representation of a service, integration, or machine-to-machine connection. It includes the credentials, permissions, ownership, and lifecycle needed to decide whether the API should be trusted, what it may access, and how that access is reviewed or revoked.
• Just-in-time Access: Just-in-time access is a privilege pattern that grants access only when it is needed and removes it afterward. For non-human identities, it reduces standing exposure by making permissions temporary, scoped, and easier to revoke than long-lived machine credentials.
• Standing Privilege: Standing privilege is access that remains active continuously instead of being issued for a specific task or window. In machine environments, it increases blast radius because the credentials can be reused, copied, or abused long after the original operational need has passed.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity lifecycle are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are responsible for identity security strategy or NHI governance in your organisation, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by Abnormal AI: Key Insights APIs now represent unmanaged identities in most enterprises. Read the original.