Secrets management in 2026: the governance gap behind sprawl

At a glance

What this is: This guide explains secrets management as the control plane for storing, rotating, and governing machine credentials, with the key finding that sprawl becomes a governance problem when secrets are hardcoded, overexposed, or left without lifecycle control.

Why it matters: IAM, PAM, and NHI teams need to treat secrets as governed credentials rather than static storage objects, because unmanaged secret sprawl expands blast radius across applications, pipelines, and cloud services.

Context

Secrets management is the discipline of securely storing, rotating, and governing digital credentials such as passwords, API keys, certificates, and tokens. In practice, the problem is not just where secrets live but how they are issued, retrieved, and retired across applications, pipelines, and cloud services.

The governance gap appears when credentials are hardcoded, copied into configuration files, or left active long after the system that created them has changed. That creates a machine-identity exposure problem for NHI programmes, because access paths outlive the assumptions behind them.

StrongDM's article frames this as an operational control issue for modern infrastructure, especially where automated systems need secrets to function without human intervention. The article is typical of current enterprise reality rather than an edge case, because secret sprawl is now baked into cloud-native and legacy environments alike.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when secrets are hardcoded into DevOps pipelines?

A: Hardcoded secrets break rotation, ownership, and offboarding at the same time. They become embedded in repositories, build systems, and configuration files, which means the credential can survive long after the workflow changes. That creates hidden persistence and makes remediation dependent on finding every copy first.

Q: Why do temporary secrets reduce risk compared with long-standing credentials?

A: Temporary secrets reduce risk because they do not assume persistent access. They are issued only for the time needed, then expire and are removed automatically. That short lifetime limits reuse after compromise, shrinks the window for lateral movement, and supports least privilege better than static credentials that can remain valid far beyond the original task.

Q: What are the signs that secret governance is failing?

A: Common signs include secrets that never expire, weak rotation discipline, and inconsistent lifecycle management across vaults and applications. Another warning signal is when security teams cannot quickly identify where a secret is used or who owns it. If those controls are missing, the organisation is likely relying on fragile manual processes instead of enforceable policy and continuous oversight.

Q: How should security teams govern machine credentials across cloud and CI/CD environments?

A: Security teams should treat machine credentials as production identities with owners, scopes, and lifecycles. That means inventorying service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates, mapping where they are used, and enforcing rotation and revocation through automated workflows rather than manual exception handling.

Technical breakdown

Why hardcoded secrets turn deployment paths into access paths

A hardcoded secret is credentials embedded in code, build files, or configuration where they can be reused outside the intended runtime. That breaks the separation between application logic and authentication state, which is why leaked secrets often become direct access tokens rather than merely sensitive data. In CI/CD pipelines, the same secret may be copied across build, test, and production contexts, widening exposure. The technical issue is not only leakage but persistence, because a secret that cannot be centrally revoked or rotated becomes an uncontrolled authentication artifact.

Practical implication: treat hardcoded secrets as an authentication design failure, not just a code hygiene issue.

How policy-based rotation reduces credential persistence

Rotation shortens the time a credential remains valid, which reduces the window in which a leaked or overused secret can be abused. But rotation only works when the surrounding lifecycle is controlled end to end: issuance, distribution, use, expiration, and decommissioning. If rotation is manual, inconsistent, or tied to human tickets, stale credentials still accumulate in long-running systems. In NHI terms, the control is closer to authenticator management than to simple storage, because the real objective is to govern trust over time rather than merely keep a secret hidden.

Practical implication: make rotation part of lifecycle governance, not a standalone maintenance task.

Why audit logging matters for non-human access

Audit logging gives security teams evidence of who or what accessed a secret, when it happened, and whether the access pattern matches policy. For non-human identities, this matters because applications and services can use secrets at machine speed, making manual oversight impossible. Logs also support compliance, but their deeper value is forensic. When a secret has been overexposed, the team needs to know which workloads used it, whether it crossed environment boundaries, and whether it was still valid after the intended owner changed. Without that visibility, the blast radius stays unknown.

Practical implication: log secret access at the point of retrieval and use those logs to trace privilege scope.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker wants durable authenticated access that bypasses normal controls and opens multiple systems from a single exposed secret.

1. Entry occurs when a secret is hardcoded into source code, configuration, or CI/CD tooling and becomes exposed through repository access or deployment artefacts.
2. Credential access follows when the exposed secret is reused to authenticate to applications, databases, or cloud services without additional verification.
3. Escalation happens when the same credential unlocks multiple systems because the secret was broadly shared or never rotated out of other environments.
4. Impact is achieved when the attacker uses that persistent access to move into production infrastructure or extract sensitive data at scale.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Azure Key Vault Contributor escalation 2024: Datadog found Azure Key Vault Contributor could add itself to access policies and read every secret, key and certificate in a vault.
• reviewdog Action compromise 2025: A stolen maintainer token poisoned reviewdog/action-setup, leaking CI secrets including the tj-actions bot token used in the next attack.

Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 150+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Secret sprawl is a governance failure before it is a storage problem. Once credentials are duplicated across vaults, pipelines, and configuration files, the organisation no longer has a single control surface. The real issue is not where the secret sits but whether its ownership, scope, and retirement are still knowable. For practitioners, that means secrets management must be treated as lifecycle governance across the full credential estate, not as a vault project.

Long-lived secrets create trust debt that accumulates faster than teams can review it. The more often credentials are copied, shared, or embedded in automation, the less meaningful a periodic access review becomes. Access review processes can confirm historic entitlement, but they cannot correct the fact that a secret already escaped into multiple runtime paths. The implication is that governance has to move closer to issuance and rotation, because review cycles arrive too late to stop many exposures.

Policy-based access controls only work when the secret lifecycle is unified across environments. A fragmented estate with multiple managers, inconsistent rotation, and hybrid deployment paths breaks the assumption that one control plane can see all credentials. That is why the named concept here is identity blast radius: each unmanaged copy of a secret expands the number of systems that can be reached from one compromise. Practitioners should measure that blast radius, not just count vaults.

Secrets management is now a machine-identity discipline, not a password discipline. Human password hygiene does not solve application-to-application authentication, and treating the two as the same leads to weak governance choices. Modern infrastructure depends on non-human identities that need issuance, rotation, auditability, and offboarding just as much as human accounts do. Teams that ignore that difference end up with excellent password controls and poor operational containment.

The market is converging on runtime control because static secrecy assumptions no longer hold. Secrets are no longer protected by being hidden at rest if they are still broadly consumable in motion. That pushes identity programmes toward tighter policy enforcement, better environment isolation, and more explicit ownership of machine credentials. The practitioner conclusion is simple: if a secret can travel faster than governance can follow, the model is already broken.

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: Service Account Security Guide

What this signals

Identity blast radius: The useful unit of measurement is no longer the vault, but the number of systems a single credential can still reach. Secret sprawl turns one leaked token into a cross-environment problem, so practitioners should focus on shrinking the number of runtime paths each secret can unlock.

Secrets management programmes now need to prove that rotation, ownership, and revocation work across all places where credentials live. That shifts the programme from storage-centric controls toward lifecycle control, with auditability at the centre of enforcement.

For practitioners

• Standardise secret inventory and ownership Create a complete inventory of passwords, API keys, certificates, and tokens, then assign an owner, environment, and expiry for each credential. Without ownership metadata, rotation and revocation decisions remain ambiguous when incidents or audits force rapid action.
• Eliminate hardcoded credentials from code and pipelines Scan source repositories, build manifests, and configuration stores for embedded secrets, then move those credentials into a governed retrieval path. Prioritise any secret used by production systems or shared across CI/CD jobs because those paths create the largest exposure window.
• Automate rotation based on credential lifetime Set rotation thresholds by secret type and runtime criticality, then enforce them through policy rather than manual ticketing. Shorten the lifetime of credentials used by application and service accounts before you attempt to optimise audit reporting.
• Separate production and non-production secret boundaries Use different access policies, vault paths, and approval logic for production, test, and development environments. Shared secret stores make it too easy for a lower-trust environment to become the stepping stone into production.
• Review secret access logs for unusual retrieval patterns Look for retrieval spikes, off-hours access, cross-environment use, and repeated access from services that should not share credentials. These signals often appear before a secret is fully abused, especially when the same token has been copied into multiple runtime paths.

Key takeaways

• Secrets management fails when credentials are hardcoded, duplicated, or left active beyond the systems they were meant to protect.
• Fragmented vaulting and inconsistent lifecycle controls make it difficult to know which secrets still exist, where they are used, and who can revoke them.
• Practitioners should prioritise ownership, rotation, and environment separation before expanding feature sets or audit reporting.

Key terms

• 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.
• 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.
• Credential Lifecycle: Credential lifecycle is the process of issuing, rotating, expiring, and revoking secrets, certificates, and tokens across their usable life. For non-human identities, lifecycle discipline is the core control that separates temporary access from persistent exposure.
• Identity Blast Radius: The amount of damage a compromised identity can cause across systems, data, and infrastructure. In NHI environments, it is shaped by permissions, network reach, and administrative capability rather than by the credential alone. Reducing blast radius is a containment strategy that limits lateral movement and data exposure.

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.