TL;DR: Machine identity sprawl is turning certificate expiry, orphaned keys, and manual tracking into outage and compliance risks, with Palo Alto Networks citing 83% of organisations experiencing a certificate-related outage in the past 24 months. The governance problem is no longer theoretical: visibility, ownership, and automation now determine whether machine identities support resilience or create hidden failure points.
At a glance
What this is: This is a machine identity security analysis arguing that unmanaged certificates, keys and secrets are causing outages and compliance exposure as sprawl outpaces manual control.
Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM and NHI programmes now have to govern machine identity lifecycle and ownership with the same discipline once reserved for human access reviews.
By the numbers:
- 83% of organisations have experienced a certificate-related outage in the past 24 months.
- Machine identities now outnumber humans 82:1 across apps, APIs, servers and workloads.
Context
Machine identity sprawl is the growth of certificates, keys and secrets across systems faster than teams can inventory, own and renew them. In identity governance terms, the problem is not simply that non-human identities exist. The problem is that their lifecycle is fragmented across teams and environments, so expiry, misconfiguration and orphaning show up first as service disruption.
The article frames this as a resilience problem as much as a security problem. When machine identities multiply across hybrid and multicloud estates, manual tracking breaks down, ownership becomes unclear and the renewal window gets missed. That creates a direct link between NHI governance and uptime, compliance posture and customer trust.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when machine identities have no clear owner?
A: When machine identities have no clear owner, offboarding, remediation, and accountability all fail together. Credentials may still be logged, but no one is responsible for validating purpose, reducing scope, or revoking access when the system changes. That creates governance debt and makes incident response slower and less reliable.
Q: Why do expired certificates create such a high operational risk?
A: Expired certificates can break authentication, encrypted sessions, and service-to-service trust at the same time, which makes them availability and security issues rather than simple maintenance misses. The risk rises sharply when inventories are incomplete and renewal happens manually across hybrid estates.
Q: How do security teams know whether machine identity governance is actually working?
A: They should be able to answer three questions quickly: who owns each credential, what system it protects, and when it expires or rotates. If the team cannot trace a token from issuance to retirement, governance is incomplete. Strong programmes also show that logs, caches, and repositories are searched for exposure, not just the vault.
A: Manual tracking relies on spreadsheets, scripts, and human follow-up to find, renew, and revoke certificates. Automated lifecycle management continuously discovers cryptographic assets, applies policy to issuance and renewal, and supports fast remediation when something changes. The practical difference is scale and reliability. Automation reduces error, shortens exposure windows, and helps sustain compliance as environments grow.
Technical breakdown
Why machine identity sprawl breaks certificate lifecycle control
Every application, API, workload, bot or automated process can create a machine identity, and each one may rely on a TLS certificate, SSH key, code signing certificate or API secret. The technical issue is scale plus heterogeneity. Different credential types have different issuance, renewal and revocation behaviours, which makes spreadsheet-based tracking brittle. As certificate lifetimes shorten, the operational burden increases while tolerance for missed renewal shrinks. In practice, the failure mode is not just expiry. It is the absence of a unified lifecycle model across all machine identity types.
Practical implication: Treat machine identity lifecycle as a governed estate, not a set of isolated tools.
How poor ownership turns misconfiguration into outage
The article links outages to weak visibility and unclear ownership. When no team can answer where a certificate lives, who owns it or whether it has been rotated, expired credentials can sit unnoticed until they break a critical API or service. That is a governance failure, not just a maintenance failure. For NHIs, ownership is the control plane that determines whether renewal, rotation and revocation actually happen before production impact. Without it, sprawl becomes a hidden dependency chain that can collapse during routine changes or certificate expiry events.
Practical implication: Assign accountable owners for each machine identity and tie them to renewal and revocation workflows.
Why manual tracking cannot keep pace with hybrid and multicloud estates
Manual inventory methods do not scale to tens of thousands of machine identities spread across cloud, on-premises and edge environments. The article also notes that AI agents and other autonomous processes add more keys, tokens and certificates to manage, increasing the rate of change. At that point, the architectural problem is not simply coverage. It is that the environment changes faster than human review can certify it. Automation becomes necessary because renewal, discovery and policy enforcement must happen at machine speed to preserve uptime and trust.
Practical implication: Move discovery, renewal and monitoring into automated workflows before certificate expiry becomes routine.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The end state is disruption or abuse of trusted machine access so that services fail, sensitive systems remain reachable or operations lose integrity.
- Entry occurs when a forgotten or unmanaged machine identity, such as an expired certificate, SSH key or API secret, remains present in production after its owner loses sight of it.
- Escalation follows when the unmanaged credential is still trusted by applications or infrastructure, allowing outages, misconfiguration effects or attacker use of persistent access paths.
- Impact appears as service interruption, broken APIs, failed transactions, compliance exposure or broader trust damage when the identity is not renewed, rotated or revoked in time.
Breaches seen in the wild
- NVIDIA code-signing certificates stolen 2022: Lapsus$ leaked two NVIDIA code-signing certificates; Windows still trusted them for drivers and attackers signed Cobalt Strike and Mimikatz with them.
- ASP.NET machine key attacks 2025: Developers copied ASP.NET machine keys from public sources; attackers used one to run Godzilla via ViewState. Microsoft found 3,000+ such keys.
Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 200+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.
NHI Mgmt Group analysis
Machine identity sprawl is an identity governance problem before it is a certificate problem. The operational pain appears as expiry and outages, but the root issue is that organisations have created more machine identities than their governance model can inventory, own and renew. That turns lifecycle management into a resilience dependency. Practitioners should treat machine identity governance as an estate-wide control discipline, not an IT maintenance task.
Ownership is the control that decides whether machine identities stay visible. When certificates, SSH keys and secrets are spread across hybrid and multicloud environments, no amount of policy language matters if there is no accountable owner for each credential. This is a classic governance gap because unowned identities do not fail loudly until they take production down. The practical conclusion is that accountability must be attached to every machine identity, not inferred from the application team.
Automated renewal is no longer an optimisation, it is the only viable operating model. The article’s own numbers point to a scale and churn problem that manual processes cannot absorb. As lifetimes shorten and identities proliferate across AI agents, workloads and APIs, the governance assumption that humans can review and renew credentials in time no longer holds. Practitioners need policy-driven automation as the default for machine identity lifecycle.
Certificate expiry is now a board-level availability issue because trust, revenue and compliance fail together. The same unmanaged identity that causes downtime can also expose regulated data and weaken customer confidence. That convergence matters because it pushes NHI governance out of the security tooling conversation and into operational risk management. The implication for practitioners is to report machine identity health in terms of service resilience, not just security hygiene.
Ephemeral credential trust debt: The article exposes a growing gap between how quickly machine identities are created and how slowly organisations can govern them. Each new credential adds future renewal, revocation and recovery work, and that debt compounds until the estate becomes opaque. The practitioner takeaway is to reduce the number of unmanaged credentials before the lifecycle burden outruns control.
From our research library:
- Companies are dedicating an average of 32.4% of their security budgets to secrets management and code security, with US organisations leading at 40.8%, according to the State of Secrets in AppSec.
- 54% of organisations are dissatisfied with their current secrets management solution because not all secrets are secured, and 43% cite lack of central management, according to the 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
- Read next: Machine Identity, PKI and Certificate Lifecycle Guide
What this signals
Machine identity drift now behaves like an availability risk, not a niche certificate issue. The pace of credential creation is faster than most governance cadences, so the programme question shifts from whether certificates can be renewed to whether they can be governed before they become operational dependencies. Teams that still separate uptime from identity are missing the control point that links them.
Ephemeral credential trust debt: Every new machine identity adds future renewal, revocation and recovery work, and the debt compounds as environments expand across cloud and AI-driven automation. That is why certificate health should be reported as a resilience signal, not just a compliance metric.
Security budgets are already reflecting the shift: companies are dedicating an average of 32.4% of their security budgets to secrets management and code security, with US organisations leading at 40.8%, according to the State of Secrets in AppSec. The signal is that governance investment is moving toward the operational layer where machine identity failures actually surface.
For practitioners
- Define ownership for every machine identity Map each certificate, SSH key, code signing certificate and secret to a named business or platform owner, then tie that owner to renewal and revocation duties.
- Automate discovery and renewal workflows Replace spreadsheet tracking with automated inventory, expiry monitoring and policy-based renewal across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments.
- Separate high-risk credential classes Track TLS certificates, SSH keys, code signing certificates and API secrets as distinct lifecycle classes because each expires, rotates and fails differently.
- Measure certificate health as an uptime signal Report expired, near-expiry and orphaned identities alongside service availability so the business sees machine identity risk as operational risk.
Key takeaways
- Machine identity sprawl turns certificates, keys and secrets into a lifecycle governance problem that can interrupt services when ownership is unclear.
- The article links unmanaged machine identities to outages, compliance risk and trust erosion, with certificate-related failures now common enough to be operationally material.
- Central ownership and automated renewal are the controls that matter most when credential volume and turnover outpace human tracking.
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 addresses the attack and risk surface, while NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and NIST CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 — Improper Offboarding | Unmanaged certificates and keys persist after ownership changes or system decommissioning. |
| NHI-02 — Secret Leakage | API secrets and keys spread across estates increase exposure when visibility is weak. | |
| NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | Unmanaged machine credentials often retain access longer than the workload needs. | |
| Recommendation — Track machine identities through offboarding so expired or orphaned credentials are revoked before they break services. Inventory exposed secrets continuously and revoke any credential that appears outside its approved location. Reduce machine identity permissions to the minimum needed for each service and review them on change. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | IA-5 directly covers lifecycle management for machine authenticators such as certificates and keys. |
| Recommendation — Apply authenticator management controls to inventory, rotate and revoke machine credentials on schedule. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | The article’s ownership and renewal problem is an access governance issue for non-human identities. |
| Recommendation — Map each machine identity to a maintained authorization record and remove access when it is no longer needed. | ||
Key terms
- Machine Identity Sprawl: Machine identity sprawl is the uncontrolled growth of non-human identities across teams, platforms, and business processes. It becomes a governance problem when identities are created faster than they can be inventoried, reviewed, rotated, or retired, leaving security teams with incomplete visibility and weak accountability.
- Certificate Lifecycle Management: The governance of digital certificates from issuance through renewal and revocation, ensuring certificates are valid, monitored, and rotated before expiry. Expired certificates are a leading cause of outages and unplanned security gaps.
- Secrets Rotation: Secrets rotation is the practice of replacing credentials on a schedule or after an event so exposed values stop working quickly. In NHI programmes, rotation must be tied to ownership and automation, otherwise credentials remain valid long after teams believe the risk has been addressed.
- 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.
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 building or maturing an IAM programme, it is worth exploring.
Published by the NHIMG editorial team on June 12, 2026.
Updated on October 10, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org