Machine identity sprawl and expired certificates are breaking uptime

At a glance

What this is: This is an analysis of how machine identity sprawl and expired certificates create outage, compliance, and security risk across hybrid environments.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, NHI, and workload identity programmes now need lifecycle control, ownership, and automation for machine credentials at enterprise scale.

By the numbers:

• 83 percent of organizations have experienced a certificate-related outage in the past 24 months.
• Machine identities outnumber humans 82:1 across modern environments.

👉 Read Palo Alto Networks' analysis of machine identity sprawl and expired certificates

Context

Machine identity sprawl happens when certificates, keys, tokens, and secrets proliferate faster than teams can inventory and govern them. In this case, the primary keyword is machine identity security, and the problem is that credential ownership and renewal discipline do not scale automatically with the number of systems being deployed.

The article's central point is that hybrid and multicloud estates create thousands of machine identities that are hard to track, easy to forget, and dangerous when they expire. For IAM, NHI, and workload identity teams, the governance gap is not abstract: unmanaged machine identities can break services, trigger audit findings, and expand lateral movement opportunities.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when machine identities are tracked manually?

A: Manual tracking breaks when credential volume outpaces human oversight. Teams lose visibility into where certificates, keys, and secrets live, who owns them, and when they expire. That creates outages, audit gaps, and stale access paths that remain valid longer than intended. Central inventory and automated lifecycle control are the practical response.

Q: Why do machine identities increase outage risk in hybrid environments?

A: Hybrid environments multiply certificates, secrets, and keys across clouds and platforms, so expiry or misconfiguration in one place can interrupt dependent services elsewhere. The risk rises when ownership is fragmented and renewal is manual. Teams need lifecycle visibility and dependency mapping to prevent one credential failure from becoming a service-wide outage.

Q: How do security teams know if certificate lifecycle controls are working?

A: They should see renewals happening before expiry, clear ownership for every credential class, and no reliance on spreadsheets for critical assets. If outages still occur because certificates expired, the control is failing. Effective programmes can inventory, rotate, and retire credentials predictably across all environments.

Q: Who is accountable when unmanaged machine identities cause an outage?

A: Accountability should sit with the identity and platform owners who control issuance, renewal, and retirement, not with the operations team forced to recover the outage. Governance should define ownership before deployment and tie exceptions to formal approval. That makes machine identity failures measurable and assignable instead of invisible.

Technical breakdown

Why machine identity sprawl becomes an outage problem

Every application, API, workload, and automated process introduces its own machine identity, usually in the form of a TLS certificate, SSH key, API secret, or code signing certificate. The technical failure is not just volume, but fragmentation: identities are scattered across clouds, platforms, and pipelines with no single control point. Once renewal or revocation depends on manual tracking, expiry becomes a latent service disruption rather than a simple administrative event.

Practical implication: centralise inventory and ownership so machine identities cannot expire outside a managed renewal process.

How certificate lifecycle management reduces hidden trust failures

Certificate lifecycle management covers issuance, renewal, rotation, and retirement. In the article's framing, the key technical issue is that certificate lifespans are shrinking while operational complexity is rising, which makes spreadsheet-based control unreliable. Automation matters because the renewal window is now short enough that human dependency becomes a control failure, especially in environments with many short-lived services and connected workloads.

Practical implication: automate lifecycle workflows for certificates and related secrets before shorter validity periods compress your response window.

Why unmanaged secrets widen the blast radius

Machine identities are not limited to certificates. SSH keys, cloud access keys, and API secrets can remain valid long after the system or user that created them has changed, and forgotten keys do not expire by default. That creates persistent access paths that attackers can abuse for lateral movement or ransomware. The architectural weakness is durable trust without continuous governance, which makes stale credentials a standing exposure rather than a one-time risk.

Practical implication: treat long-lived secrets as high-risk assets and tie them to lifecycle controls, not one-time deployment events.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker aims to turn weak machine identity governance into service disruption, persistent access, or data exposure.

1. Entry occurs when an unmanaged certificate, SSH key, or API secret remains active after the system or workflow that depends on it has changed.
2. Escalation follows when the same credential is reused across applications or environments, giving an attacker broader access than the original owner intended.
3. Impact emerges as expired or mismanaged machine identities trigger outages, enable lateral movement, or expose regulated data and services.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Sisense breach — unauthorized GitLab access led to exfiltration of access tokens, API keys and certificates.
• Shai Hulud npm malware campaign — Shai Hulud campaign: npm malware exposed secrets on GitHub.

Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Machine identity sprawl is now an IAM governance problem, not an infrastructure side issue. Once certificates, keys, and secrets outnumber human accounts, the programme is no longer managing a niche technical asset class. The control question becomes whether ownership, renewal, and retirement are enforced with the same discipline applied to human lifecycle governance. Practitioners should treat machine identity security as a core identity programme responsibility.

Manual tracking creates a trust gap that scales faster than remediation. The article makes clear that spreadsheets and ad hoc ownership models cannot keep pace with hybrid and multicloud estates. That is not just operational friction, it is a governance failure that leaves organisations unable to prove where credentials live or who is accountable for them. The implication is that visibility and automation have become baseline control requirements.

Certificate expiry is a failure mode with business impact, not a technical nuisance. When 83 percent of organisations report a certificate-related outage, the issue is no longer rare or exceptional. It shows that lifecycle breakdowns can directly interrupt revenue, customer trust, and regulated operations. Practitioners should interpret expiry as a resilience signal, not just a maintenance event.

Unmanaged machine identities widen the attack surface in ways human IAM reviews miss. Forgotten SSH keys and stale secrets can survive long after the original business context has changed, creating access that no annual review reliably finds. This is why machine identity governance must be built around lifecycle events, not calendar-based human review assumptions. Security teams should re-evaluate where persistent trust is still accepted as normal.

Identity blast radius is the right named concept for this problem. A single unmanaged machine identity can affect uptime, compliance, and lateral movement potential at the same time. That means the harm from one credential failure is not isolated to one system. The practitioner implication is to measure machine identities by the damage they can propagate, not by the number of credentials alone.

From our research:

• 57% of organisations lack a complete inventory of their machine identities, according to The Critical Gaps in Machine Identity Management report.
• 61% rely on spreadsheets or manual tracking for machine identity management, which explains why ownership, renewal, and retirement slip out of control.
• For the governance angle, read NHI Lifecycle Management Guide for the lifecycle controls that replace ad hoc tracking.

What this signals

Identity blast radius is becoming a practical metric for machine identity programmes. If one expired certificate can interrupt multiple services, then inventory quality and renewal automation matter more than credential count alone. Teams should pair policy with dependency mapping and anchor their operating model to the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and the Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs.

Palo Alto Networks' framing also reinforces a broader governance shift: machine identity security is now part of business continuity. As certificate lifespans shorten, the question is whether identity teams can prove ownership, automate renewal, and retire stale credentials before service impact appears.

The operational signal to watch is whether your programme can eliminate spreadsheet dependency without creating new blind spots. If the answer is no, the next outage will probably look administrative on paper and architectural in practice.

For practitioners

• Build a complete machine identity inventory Map certificates, SSH keys, API secrets, and cloud access keys across every environment, then assign a named owner for each class and system.
• Automate certificate lifecycle workflows Replace spreadsheet tracking with automated issuance, renewal, and retirement workflows so renewal events cannot depend on manual follow-up.
• Reduce long-lived secret exposure Identify credentials that do not expire by default, limit where they are stored, and tie them to rotation and retirement controls.
• Review lateral movement paths through machine identities Check whether reused credentials span multiple apps or workloads, because shared machine identities can turn one compromise into broader access.

Key takeaways

• Machine identity sprawl turns certificates, keys, and secrets into availability and compliance risks when ownership is unclear and renewal is manual.
• The scale problem is already visible, with machine identities outnumbering humans and certificate-related outages affecting most organisations.
• Teams that inventory, automate, and retire machine credentials consistently will reduce outage exposure and tighten the trust boundary.

Key terms

• Machine Identity: A machine identity is a credentialed digital identity used by software, workloads, services, or devices to authenticate to other systems. It usually takes the form of a certificate, key, token, or secret, and it requires lifecycle governance just like human identities do.
• Certificate Lifecycle Management: Certificate lifecycle management is the process of issuing, renewing, rotating, and retiring certificates before they expire or become unsafe. In machine identity programmes, it is the control that prevents expired trust material from turning into outages or access failures.
• Secret Sprawl: Secret sprawl is the uncontrolled spread of API keys, tokens, passwords, and certificates across tools, tickets, code, and cloud services. It creates hidden exposure because the same credential can exist in multiple places, making discovery, rotation, and retirement much harder.
• Identity Blast Radius: Identity blast radius is the amount of damage a single credential failure can cause across systems, services, and data. For machine identities, it describes how one expired or reused secret can trigger outages, lateral movement, compliance issues, and trust erosion at the same time.

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 Palo Alto Networks: The Invisible Threat, Machine Identity Sprawl and Expired Certificates. Read the original.