Secrets management gaps are widening machine identity risk

At a glance

What this is: This is an analysis of why secrets management remains a weak point in NHI security, with hardcoded credentials, shared accounts, and manual rotation creating persistent exposure.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and NHI programmes all depend on knowing where credentials live, who can use them, and how quickly they expire.

By the numbers:

• Machine identities now outnumber human users by more than 80 to 1.
• Only 15% of organizations feel highly confident in preventing NHI attacks.
• 69% express concerns about them.

👉 Read Apono's guide to secret management for NHI security

Context

Secrets management is the discipline of storing, issuing, rotating, and controlling access to credentials so they do not sprawl across code, pipelines, and cloud variables. In NHI security, it is the control layer that determines whether machine identities stay bounded or become a hidden access path into production systems.

The governance problem is not that secrets exist, but that they persist too long, are shared too broadly, and are often difficult to inventory. That creates an NHI management problem for IAM, PAM, and security teams that need ownership, scope, and expiry to be explicit rather than assumed.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams reduce risk from exposed NHI secrets?

A: Start by removing secrets from code, tickets, and configuration files, then move to vault-issued credentials with automatic expiry. The key is to make every secret traceable to an owner and a purpose, so leaked credentials can be revoked quickly and reused less broadly. Without that lifecycle control, exposure becomes difficult to contain.

Q: Why do shared service accounts create more risk than dedicated workload identities?

A: Shared service accounts hide which workload used the credential and expand the blast radius of any leak. Dedicated workload identities make access easier to scope, audit, and revoke because each credential maps to one function. That improves accountability and reduces the chance that one compromise reaches multiple systems.

Q: What breaks when secret rotation depends on manual tickets?

A: Manual rotation breaks down because it is too slow and too easy to defer when teams are busy. Expired or stale credentials remain active, while the organisation assumes they were updated. Automation closes that gap by making rotation part of the deployment or access lifecycle instead of an optional task.

Q: Who is accountable when a leaked NHI credential is reused in production?

A: Accountability should sit with the team that owns the workload and the identity lifecycle, not with the person who discovered the leak. Governance needs clear ownership, a revocation path, and audit evidence showing when the secret was issued, used, and retired. NIST CSF and OWASP NHI both reinforce that lifecycle control is part of the control environment.

Technical breakdown

Why hardcoded secrets become an identity problem

Hardcoded secrets turn source code, scripts, and configuration files into credential stores. Once a key is committed, copies can appear in branches, mirrors, build logs, and developer tooling, which means the identity outlives the system it was meant to protect. The technical failure is not only exposure, but the loss of control over where the credential is replicated and how long it remains valid. In NHI terms, the secret becomes a portable identity with no reliable lifecycle boundary.

Practical implication: eliminate secrets from repositories and replace them with vault-issued credentials that are created at runtime.

How shared service accounts expand blast radius

Shared service accounts collapse attribution and scope. When multiple pipelines or workloads use the same credential, the organisation loses the ability to tie access to one workload, one purpose, or one owner. That makes audit trails weak and incident response slow, because the secret no longer maps cleanly to a single identity. In practice, shared credentials also turn one leak into a broader compromise, since the same key often reaches more than one system.

Practical implication: replace shared accounts with workload-specific identities and constrain each one to a single function or namespace.

Why static tokens fail in zero trust environments

Zero Trust assumes each request can be evaluated continuously, but static tokens are built to be reused until they expire or are revoked. That mismatch creates a gap between policy and reality, especially in CI/CD and automated workflows where credentials can sit idle for long periods. Short-lived tokens, JIT issuance, and automatic expiry reduce that mismatch by limiting the useful life of any credential. Without those controls, compromise windows remain open far longer than teams expect.

Practical implication: move from long-lived tokens to time-bound secrets and trigger rotation on deployment or access events.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker wants to turn a single exposed credential into broad, repeatable access across workloads and production systems.

1. Entry begins when a secret is exposed in code, scripts, cloud variables, or another shared location that attackers routinely scan.
2. Escalation follows when the exposed credential carries broad permissions or is reused across multiple services, allowing the attacker to move from one workload to several.
3. Impact occurs when the leaked secret enables production access, data extraction, or privileged system changes before the credential is rotated or revoked.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Reviewdog GitHub Action supply chain attack — reviewdog/action-setup GitHub Action supply chain attack exposed secrets.
• CI/CD pipeline exploitation case study — full server takeover via exposed .git directory and mismanaged CI/CD pipeline secrets.

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

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Static secret trust was designed for credentials that stay traceable, owned, and short-lived enough to be audited. That assumption fails when credentials are copied into code, branches, tickets, and build artefacts, because the identity can no longer be tied to a single control point. The implication is not simply that more rotation is needed, but that the old ownership model no longer describes where access actually lives.

Identity blast radius is the right named concept for this problem. A single leaked token does not behave like a single failure when it is reused across pipelines, environments, or service accounts. The damage multiplies because the secret becomes a shared access primitive rather than a bounded identity. Practitioners should treat every reuse pattern as a blast-radius amplifier, not a convenience.

Secrets management is now a governance discipline, not just a storage problem. Central vaulting helps, but the real issue is whether teams can prove who owns a secret, why it exists, and when it stops working. Without that lifecycle evidence, controls drift into theatre while the attack surface keeps growing. The practical conclusion is that NHI governance must include lifecycle proof, not just credential storage.

Manual rotation fails because it depends on human-paced response in an environment where exposure is machine-speed. That gap is visible in repositories, deployment pipelines, and shared configuration layers where a leaked secret can be reused before a ticket closes. The field should stop treating rotation as a maintenance task and start treating it as an exposure-limiting control with operational consequences.

NHI governance and IAM are converging on the same question: can access be made temporary by default? Secrets that are issued late, scoped tightly, and revoked automatically align better with Zero Trust than long-lived static credentials. The programme implication is clear. Ownership, expiry, and auditability have to be built into the identity lifecycle, not added after the fact.

From our research:

• 88% of security professionals are concerned about secrets sprawl, with 49% of those in larger organisations described as "very concerned", according to The 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
• 54% of organisations are dissatisfied with their current secrets management solution because not all secrets are secured, and 43% cite lack of central management.
• For a broader lifecycle view, read Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs for provisioning, rotation, and offboarding controls.

What this signals

Identity blast radius: the useful question is no longer whether a secret exists, but how far it can travel before control is re-established. With machine identities now outnumbering human users by more than 80 to 1, the governance burden shifts from periodic review to continuous containment.

Secrets programmes that still rely on manual rotation will struggle to keep pace with modern deployment velocity. The control objective is not perfect secrecy, but shrinking the time between exposure, detection, and invalidation so that a leaked credential has less room to move.

Teams building out NHI governance should align secret lifecycle controls with Zero Trust and lifecycle processes, not treat them as separate workstreams. The next maturity step is to prove that every credential can be owned, scoped, rotated, and retired without relying on tribal knowledge.

For practitioners

• Inventory every machine credential Map service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates to an owner, purpose, and environment so you can see which secrets are active, orphaned, or duplicated.
• Remove secrets from source control Scan repositories, branches, and build artefacts for hardcoded credentials, then replace them with vault-issued values and automated retrieval at runtime.
• Replace shared accounts with scoped identities Assign one workload-specific identity per pipeline, namespace, or function so a leak cannot be reused across unrelated systems.
• Automate expiry and rotation triggers Tie rotation to deployment, access events, or policy thresholds so credentials do not remain valid long enough to become silent liabilities.
• Feed secret access into audit and detection Send secret usage logs to your SIEM and review dormant, overprivileged, or never-rotated credentials on a recurring basis.

Key takeaways

• Secrets management has become a core NHI governance issue because leaked credentials can turn a single mistake into broad system access.
• The operational risk is measurable, with machine identities vastly outnumbering humans and concern levels for secrets sprawl already high.
• The practical answer is lifecycle control: inventory, scope, rotate, and retire credentials before they become reusable attack paths.

Key terms

• Secrets management: Secrets management is the process of storing, issuing, rotating, and revoking credentials so they do not sprawl across code, pipelines, and cloud services. For NHI programmes, the discipline is as much about lifecycle control and ownership as it is about secure storage.
• Non-human identity: A non-human identity is any credentialed machine actor such as a service account, API key, token, certificate, bot, or workload identity. In practice, each NHI needs a defined owner, scope, and expiry so it can be governed like an access-bearing identity rather than a technical artefact.
• Identity blast radius: Identity blast radius is the amount of access that can be reached when one credential is exposed or misused. In NHI environments, the blast radius grows when secrets are shared, overprivileged, or reused across systems, which is why lifecycle scoping matters as much as storage.
• Just enough privilege: Just enough privilege is the practice of granting only the access needed for a specific workload, task, or time window. For NHIs, it works best when privileges are tied to a single function and expire automatically, reducing the chance that a leaked credential can be reused broadly.

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 Apono: Secret Management: A Step-by-step Guide to NHI Security. Read the original.