TL;DR: Arcon highlights that NHI access management has expanded from service accounts and hardcoded credentials into broader governance for secrets, APIs, bots, and cloud-native systems, with centralised control now treated as a core operating requirement. The underlying issue is not just storage, but lifecycle and access authority across machine-to-machine interactions.
At a glance
What this is: This is an executive-view report on NHI access governance that argues secret handling now spans service accounts, APIs, bots, and cloud-native systems, with centralised lifecycle control as the key theme.
Why it matters: It matters because identity teams have to govern machine-to-machine access as an ongoing lifecycle problem, not a narrow credential-storage problem, across NHI, autonomous, and human-adjacent access paths.
👉 Read Arcon's report on NHI access governance and digital vault management
Context
NHI access governance now has to cover more than service accounts and scheduled tasks. As automation, APIs, bots, and cloud-native systems proliferate, the problem shifts from simple credential storage to the governance of secrets, privileges, and lifecycle ownership across machine-to-machine access paths.
The operational gap is that many programmes still treat secrets as static assets rather than governed identities. That model breaks once credentials, tokens, and keys are embedded in application flows, because access decisions, revocation, and mapping to ownership all become part of the security control surface.
Key questions
A: Treat hardcoded and poorly stored credentials as an immediate exposure problem, not a coding convenience. Security teams should inventory where credentials live, remove them from code and scripts, move them into managed secrets storage, and require rotation for anything already exposed. Because these secrets are easy to copy and hard to detect, they often become the fastest path to lateral movement and persistent access.
Q: Why do long-lived secrets keep creating risk even when teams centralise them?
A: Centralisation does not remove risk if ownership, access scope, and revocation rules are unclear. Long-lived secrets still persist across many consuming systems, so a single failure can expose multiple workflows and identities. The control problem is governance across the full lifecycle, not storage location.
Q: What breaks when corporate IT machine identities are not lifecycle-managed?
A: What breaks is the assumption that mature infrastructure controls automatically govern non-human access. Service accounts, SSH keys, and embedded credentials can survive migrations and ownership changes, which means access outlives accountability. The practical result is hidden privilege drift, lateral movement paths, and a governance gap that normal reviews do not reliably catch.
Q: What is the difference between dynamic secrets and static secrets for NHI governance?
A: Static secrets remain valid until someone rotates or revokes them, so exposure windows can be long. Dynamic secrets are issued for a shorter purpose and can shrink exposure, but only if the surrounding governance tracks issuance, use, and retirement properly. The difference is not just technical format; it is control over lifespan.
Technical breakdown
Why hardcoded credentials create governance debt
Hardcoded credentials turn access into an opaque dependency embedded inside code, scripts, and automated jobs. That matters because the secret is no longer managed at the point of use, so ownership, rotation, revocation, and auditability all weaken at the same time. In NHI governance terms, the credential behaves like a hidden privilege path rather than a controlled identity. This is why secrets sprawl is not just a storage problem; it is a lifecycle and visibility problem that creates lasting exposure after deployment. See the guide to the secret sprawl challenge. Read Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge.
Practical implication: treat embedded credentials as a lifecycle failure, not a coding shortcut, and inventory them before any rotation programme can be trusted.
How central vaults change the control plane for secrets
A central vault changes the control plane by separating secret storage from application runtime, but that does not remove governance complexity. The vault still has to handle issuance, policy, access boundaries, and rotation logic across many consuming systems, which means it becomes part of the identity plane rather than a passive repository. If the vault is misconfigured, the blast radius can widen instead of shrink. This is why vault governance has to include policy design, access scoping, and lifecycle discipline, not just centralisation. See the guide to NHI rotation challenges. Read Guide to NHI Rotation Challenges.
Practical implication: validate vault policy boundaries and rotation paths together, because centralisation without control design can still expose sensitive credentials.
Why machine-to-machine and application-to-application access need identity lifecycle management
Machine-to-machine and application-to-application interactions create persistent trust relationships that look simple until ownership changes, workloads are retired, or tokens outlive the systems that issued them. Lifecycle management gives those relationships an owner, a revocation path, and a retirement process. Without that, digital identities accumulate across applications and environments with no reliable offboarding event. The result is standing access that survives the business reason for creating it. In practice, this is where NHI governance converges with IAM discipline: every digital identity needs provisioning, mapping, review, and removal rules. See the NHI lifecycle management guide. See the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide.
Practical implication: map every non-human credential to an owner and a retirement trigger so access does not outlive the system or process it supports.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The attacker’s objective is to turn exposed machine credentials into durable access that can move through automated environments and expose sensitive systems or data.
- Entry begins when long-term credentials are embedded in code or exposed through weak secrets handling, creating a reusable access path for attackers.
- Escalation follows when those credentials grant machine-level permissions that can be reused across automation, APIs, or application flows without strong lifecycle controls.
- Impact occurs when compromised non-human identities allow unauthorised access to systems, data, or downstream services at scale.
Breaches seen in the wild
- Cisco Active Directory credentials leak 2025: Kraken leaked Cisco Active Directory hashes, including service and krbtgt accounts; Cisco says they came from its 2022 breach, not a new one.
- 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
Secrets governance is now an identity governance problem, not a storage problem. The article’s central point is that credentials, keys, and tokens now sit inside a broader NHI access model that includes automation, APIs, bots, and cloud-native systems. That means ownership, access policy, and revocation matter as much as where the secret is stored. Practitioners should treat secrets as governed identities with lifecycle obligations, not as inert configuration values.
Centralisation reduces sprawl only when it also reduces ambiguity. A unified dashboard can still leave organisations with unclear ownership, inconsistent policy enforcement, and uneven lifecycle management if the surrounding governance model is weak. The real question is whether the control plane can map each digital identity to a business owner and a revocation path. Without that, centralisation can conceal risk rather than remove it.
Static credential assumptions are the weak point in modern NHI programmes. The report reflects an environment where machine-to-machine access is no longer occasional or scripted, but continuous and distributed. That makes static trust assumptions brittle because access now outlives the job, the workflow, or the application instance that created it. The implication is that NHI programmes need to govern issuance and retirement as a single lifecycle, not as separate tasks.
Static vs dynamic secrets is now the right architectural comparison for NHI teams. The report’s core message is that long-lived secrets do not scale cleanly once automation and cloud-native systems proliferate. Dynamic credentials compress exposure windows, but only if governance is strong enough to track identity, policy, and revocation across the consuming estate. Practitioners should use that distinction to separate genuine control from simple central storage.
The first-order risk is identity accumulation, not just credential leakage. Once APIs, bots, and application integrations start sharing the same access substrate, the environment accumulates non-human identities that are hard to inventory and even harder to retire. That accumulation is what turns one exposed secret into a recurring governance issue. Teams should focus on ownership, lifecycle, and offboarding as the controls that determine whether machine access becomes permanent.
From our research library:
- 30.9% of organisations store long-term credentials directly in code, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 44% of organisations are currently using a dedicated secrets management system, according to the 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
- Read next: Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge
What this signals
Ephemeral credential trust debt: as automation scales, organisations inherit more access relationships than their review cadence can realistically govern. The practical signal is that NHI programmes need to shift from periodic inspection to control at issuance and retirement, because long-lived access paths do not fail on a tidy schedule.
The article points to a broader market pattern: secrets handling is moving from a developer convenience topic into an enterprise governance discipline. Teams that still separate secrets management from identity governance will keep missing the link between credential sprawl, ownership ambiguity, and offboarding failure.
For practitioners
- Inventory embedded credentials across code and automation Search code repositories, scripts, CI pipelines, and deployment artefacts for hardcoded credentials, then assign each finding to an owner for remediation and revocation.
- Separate secret storage from secret governance Define who owns each secret, which systems may consume it, and what event triggers rotation or revocation, so the vault acts as a governed control plane rather than a passive store.
- Map every machine identity to a lifecycle trigger Tie service accounts, API keys, and tokens to provisioning, review, and offboarding events so access cannot survive workload retirement or ownership changes.
- Test whether vault policy matches runtime reality Validate that application access paths, approval rules, and rotation intervals align with how workloads actually authenticate, especially where machine-to-machine interactions are frequent.
Key takeaways
- NHI risk is increasingly created by how secrets are governed across automation, APIs, bots, and cloud-native systems, not just by where they are stored.
- Hardcoded credentials and long-lived secrets create lasting exposure because they weaken ownership, rotation, and revocation across the lifecycle.
- Identity teams should manage machine credentials as governed identities, with clear owners, runtime policy, and offboarding triggers.
Related NHI Mgmt Group resources: Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge · NHI Lifecycle Management Guide · Guide to NHI Rotation Challenges · Secrets Management Buyer's Guide
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 CIS Controls v8 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 — Secret Leakage | Hardcoded credentials and exposed secrets are central to the article’s NHI governance problem. |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | The article focuses on long-term credentials and the control problems they create at scale. | |
| NHI-01 — Improper Offboarding | Lifecycle management is a core theme because machine identities must be retired when systems change. | |
| Recommendation — Scan repositories and automation for leaked NHI secrets and revoke exposed credentials immediately. Reduce exposure by replacing long-lived NHI secrets with shorter-lived, governed credentials. Tie NHI offboarding to workload retirement, ownership change, and access removal triggers. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | The article is fundamentally about credential lifecycle and management for machine identities. |
| Recommendation — Apply authenticator management to rotate, revoke, and track machine credentials under policy. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | The post centres on managing machine access and lifecycle ownership across accounts and secrets. |
| Recommendation — Use account management to inventory, govern, and retire non-human access paths. | ||
Key terms
- Non-Human Identity (NHI): A digital identity assigned to a non-human entity such as a software application, service account, API key, bot, machine, or AI agent that enables it to authenticate and interact with systems without direct human involvement. NHIs now outnumber human identities in most enterprises by 25 to 50 times.
- Hardcoded Credential: A secret such as a password, API key, or token embedded directly in source code rather than retrieved from a secure vault at runtime. Hardcoded credentials are one of the most common and dangerous NHI vulnerabilities.
- Secrets Management: The discipline of securely storing, distributing, rotating, and auditing secrets across an organisation's systems and pipelines, typically implemented via a centralised secrets vault such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Akeyless.
- Digital Identity Workflow: A digital identity workflow is the sequence of steps used to verify, approve, or authenticate someone in an online service. In charity settings, it often includes consent collection, identity proofing, referee checks, or login controls, depending on the risk and the type of participant involved.
What's in the full article
Arcon's full report covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Unified dashboard capabilities for managing digital assets and access permissions across machine and application identities
- How the report frames creation, mapping, and lifecycle management of digital identities in practice
- The report's vendor-specific description of data processing and access control workflows
- The full contextual framing behind the Executive View research that this analysis only summarises
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 October 22, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org