Machine identities and secrets sprawl in energy operations

At a glance

What this is: NHI Mgmt Group's analysis, drawing on GitGuardian's event briefing: Energy-sector machine identities are proliferating across IT and OT, and exposed secrets without ownership or rotation create lasting governance gaps.

Why it matters: This matters because energy operators need to govern service accounts, tokens and API keys as business-critical identities, not incidental technical artifacts, across both operational and enterprise environments.

👉 Register for GitGuardian's event briefing at the ONE-ISAC Annual Summit on machine identities

Context

Energy infrastructure now depends on software integrations, cloud services and automation, which means every new connection adds non-human identities that must be owned, monitored and retired. In an energy environment, the governance problem is not just how credentials are created but who is responsible for them across IT and OT boundaries.

The hard part is that secrets often live longer than the systems they support. When API keys, tokens and service accounts are embedded in scripts or pipelines without lifecycle control, visibility disappears even though access remains active. That is why energy programmes need a governance model for non-human identity rather than treating credentials as implementation detail.

Key questions

Q: What problem does ownership attribution solve for service accounts and API keys?

A: It closes the gap between exposure detection and accountable remediation. Many organisations can find the secret, but not the human who introduced it, maintains it, or can safely replace it. Ownership attribution gives security teams a practical way to assign action without relying on informal knowledge that disappears during staff changes.

Q: Why do leaked secrets remain dangerous after they are detected?

A: They remain dangerous because discovery does not automatically invalidate authentication. If the secret is still valid, an attacker can reuse it exactly as the legitimate system would, which turns a past mistake into present access.

Q: Why do hardcoded credentials in CI/CD pipelines create so much risk?

A: Hardcoded credentials create standing access that outlives the job, the team, and sometimes the project itself. If the secret is copied into code, logs, runners, or config files, revocation becomes slow and uncertain. That makes pipeline compromise easier to turn into broader access, especially when the same secret is reused across multiple environments.

Q: What is the difference between service accounts and API keys in non-human identity management?

A: Service accounts and API keys both represent non-human access, but they serve different purposes. A service account is an identity that can be granted permissions and governed like any other account. An API key is usually a credential that authenticates a system or application call. Both need inventory, rotation, scope limits, and revocation controls to reduce exposure.

Background and context

Why machine identities accumulate in energy environments

Energy firms increasingly stitch together legacy operational systems, cloud platforms and automation tooling. Each integration tends to create a new service account, token or API key, and those credentials are often provisioned for convenience rather than for a defined lifecycle. Over time, the identity estate grows faster than the process used to track it. The result is not just sprawl but ambiguity: the organisation can no longer answer which non-human identities are still valid, who owns them, or which environment they are trusted in. Read the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.

Practical implication: Map every machine identity to an owner, purpose and expiry condition before it is allowed into production.

How exposed secrets become governance failures

A leaked secret is only one part of the problem. The larger failure is that many credentials remain usable long after discovery because rotation, revocation and offboarding are not treated as a single lifecycle control. In practice, an exposed token can keep authorising workloads, pipelines or third-party integrations until someone manually intervenes. That turns detection into a weak signal unless it is coupled to inventory, ownership and credential state management. See the Leaked Credential and Secret Incident Response Playbook.

Practical implication: Treat exposed credentials as active identities until proven otherwise and link detection to revocation workflows.

What NHI governance looks like across IT and OT

In converged energy environments, the same identity can touch enterprise cloud services and operational systems, so governance must account for both business risk and operational continuity. That does not mean every credential is the same; it means the control objective is consistent across domains: know what exists, know what it can reach, and know how it is retired. Without that model, teams end up protecting the perimeter while leaving machine identities under-governed inside it. Read Guide to SPIFFE and SPIRE.

Practical implication: Apply one inventory and ownership model across IT and OT rather than managing machine identities in separate silos.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Machine identity governance fails when organisations treat credentials as plumbing rather than as governed identities. API keys, tokens and service accounts now sit on the same risk surface as human accounts when they can reach production systems, yet many programmes still manage them as implementation leftovers. That creates blind spots in ownership, review and revocation. Energy operators should treat the machine identity estate as a first-class governance domain, not a back-office secret store.

Secrets sprawl is a lifecycle problem before it is a detection problem. Exposed credentials matter because they often remain live after discovery, and that persistence is what turns a leak into enduring exposure. Rotation challenges for non-human identities become especially acute in environments with legacy OT dependencies, where manual remediation is slow and change windows are narrow. The governance gap is not the alert itself but the inability to remove trust quickly enough.

Cross-environment identity governance is now a convergence issue, not a silo issue. Energy firms increasingly run the same service identity across cloud, enterprise IT and operational tooling, which means a single credential can bridge domains that are usually governed separately. That collapses the assumption that OT identity risk can be managed apart from cloud identity risk. Practitioners need one accountability model for the credential, regardless of where it is used.

Hardcoded secrets create a durable access layer that outlives the system design that created it. The problem is not only leakage but persistence: scripts, pipelines and integrations keep working because the identity remains trusted after the people who created it move on. That is why machine identity offboarding has to be explicit. Governance teams should measure how much of their access estate can still function without an identifiable owner.

From our research library:

• 79% of organisations have experienced secrets leaks, with 77% of these incidents resulting in tangible damage, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• 61% of organisations still define privileged users as humans only, overlooking the role of non-human identities in privileged access, according to KPMG.
• Read next: Leaked Credential and Secret Incident Response Playbook

What this signals

Secrets sprawl is now a convergence risk: as energy firms connect operational technology with cloud services, the same credential can become a bridge across environments that were never designed to share trust. Governance has to follow the credential, not the team boundary, or ownership will fragment and revocation will lag.

Identity blast radius grows when machine identities are reused across systems. A single service account or token that survives across scripts, pipelines and runtime services can turn one leak into several reachable systems. That makes lifecycle controls, not just discovery, the limiting factor in reducing exposure.

Energy programmes should expect more scrutiny on machine identity ownership because incident responders can no longer assume a leaked secret is a narrow technical issue. The question is whether the organisation can prove who owns the credential, where it is valid and how quickly it can be retired when exposed.

For practitioners

• Inventory machine identities across IT and OT Build a shared register for service accounts, API keys, tokens and certificates, including owner, purpose, environment and expiry state.
• Link secret detection to revocation Treat every exposed credential as active until its access has been confirmed removed, and route findings into a revocation workflow rather than a ticket queue.
• Remove hardcoded credentials from delivery paths Scan source repositories, scripts and CI/CD pipelines for embedded secrets and replace them with governed retrieval at runtime.

Key takeaways

• Energy-sector integrations now create machine identities faster than many programmes can inventory and govern them.
• The main risk is not just secret exposure but the persistence of valid credentials after exposure is found.
• Ownership, rotation and offboarding must be managed together or exposed credentials will keep bridging IT and OT systems.

Related NHI Mgmt Group resources: Ultimate Guide to NHIs · Guide to NHI Rotation Challenges · Leaked Credential and Secret Incident Response Playbook · Guide to SPIFFE and SPIRE

Key terms

• Machine Identity: The digital identity of a machine, device, or workload, such as a server, container, or VM, used to authenticate it within a network. Sometimes used interchangeably with NHI, though NHI is the broader category.
• Secrets Sprawl: The uncontrolled proliferation of sensitive credentials, API keys, tokens, passwords, certificates, across codebases, cloud environments, CI/CD pipelines, and configuration files. In 2024, over 50 million leaked secrets were found on the dark web.
• Service Account: A special-purpose account used by applications, automated tools, or services rather than a human user to interact with systems, APIs, and infrastructure. Service accounts are a primary category of NHI and one of the most frequently exploited attack vectors.
• API Key: A unique identifier used to authenticate a software application or service when calling an API. API keys are static, long-lived credentials and a major source of secrets sprawl. In 2024, over 50 million leaked API keys were found on the dark web.

What to expect at the briefing

GitGuardian's full event briefing covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• On-site discussion of how energy teams detect leaked secrets in hybrid IT and OT environments
• Summit context on how peers are approaching NHI governance across upstream, midstream and downstream operations
• Practical talking points on ownership, rotation and offboarding for service accounts and API keys
• Direct conversations with the GitGuardian team at the ONE-ISAC Annual Summit in The Woodlands

👉 GitGuardian's full event page covers the summit context, venue details and on-site discussion topics for energy-sector machine identities.

Deepen your knowledge

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