Secrets sprawl exposes the governance gap in NHI security

At a glance

What this is: This article explains how secrets sprawl happens and why distributed credentials undermine visibility, control, and breach response in identity programmes.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and NHI teams need to govern credentials as a lifecycle problem across repositories, pipelines, collaboration tools, and vaults, not as isolated storage hygiene.

By the numbers:

• Internal repositories are 6x more likely to contain secrets than public ones (32.2% vs 5.6%), contradicting the assumption that private repos are safe.
• AI-related credential leaks surged 81.5% year-over-year in 2025, with the surrounding AI infrastructure leaking 5x faster than core LLM providers.
• 64% of valid secrets leaked in 2022 are still valid and exploitable today, proving that detection alone is not enough without automated revocation.

👉 Read Akeyless' analysis of secrets sprawl and NHI governance

Context

Secrets sprawl is the uncontrolled distribution of credentials across systems, tools, and teams. In NHI programmes, it creates a basic governance failure: organisations lose track of where secrets exist, who can use them, and whether they are still valid.

The article focuses on a familiar but persistent identity problem. Secrets are needed for development and operations, but when they are duplicated in code, configuration files, chat tools, or multiple vaults, visibility collapses and the blast radius of compromise grows.

For IAM and NHI practitioners, the key issue is not storage alone. The real problem is lifecycle control across discovery, access, rotation, audit, and revocation, especially where secrets are embedded in CI/CD and third-party integrations.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams handle exposed secrets in modern software pipelines?

A: Treat exposed secrets as identity incidents, not just code defects. Identify the owning service, revoke the credential everywhere it may be used, and verify that downstream automation still functions. The goal is to shorten the secret’s usable life while preserving legitimate operations through a controlled rotation process.

Q: Why does secrets sprawl increase breach risk so quickly?

A: Because one leaked credential often unlocks more than one system. Secrets are frequently reused, duplicated, and hidden in places security teams do not monitor continuously, so an attacker who finds one valid secret can pivot into other environments before defenders notice.

Q: What do organisations get wrong about vaultless secrets management?

A: The common mistake is assuming that distributing secrets closer to applications makes them easier to govern. In reality, vaultless designs shift responsibility to developers and pipelines, which can reduce visibility, weaken consistency, and make rotation harder to enforce at scale.

Q: How do NHI secrets differ from human credentials in governance terms?

A: NHI secrets are consumed by systems and automation, so they need machine-readable lifecycle control, not human-centric access assumptions. Human users can be questioned, reauthentic​ated, and trained. A service account or API key needs discovery, expiry, least privilege, and offboarding aligned to its actual use.

Technical breakdown

Why secret sprawl expands the attack surface

Secret sprawl happens when credentials are distributed faster than they are governed. The same password, API key, token, or certificate can appear in code, configuration files, collaboration tools, and repositories, creating duplicate trust paths. Once that happens, one exposed copy can unlock multiple systems because secrets are often reusable and rarely tied to a single context. Version history makes this worse because removing a secret from current code does not remove it from old commits or cloned environments. The security issue is therefore structural, not incidental: every unmanaged copy becomes a potential entry point.

Practical implication: Map where credentials are duplicated and treat every duplicate as a separate risk-bearing asset.

Why visibility fails in pipelines, repos, and collaboration tools

Detection breaks down when secrets live outside a single control plane. Development workflows spread credentials across GitHub repositories, CI/CD pipelines, Slack, email, wikis, and shared files, which means scanning only one environment leaves blind spots. Private repositories are not inherently safer because access controls do not prevent accidental placement of secrets. The result is fragmented evidence of where secrets live and whether they are active, stale, or orphaned. In practice, this is why central discovery and logging matter more than any one vault product: the governance problem is incomplete inventory plus incomplete attribution.

Practical implication: Build discovery coverage across code, pipelines, chat, and storage locations before trying to optimise rotation frequency.

What centralised secret governance changes

Centralised secret governance changes the problem from scattered ownership to managed lifecycle. Instead of asking teams to remember every secret manually, the control model ties issuance, access, logging, rotation, and expiration to a consistent policy. That matters because secrets are not just stored objects, they are active credentials with a usable lifetime. In NHI terms, the organisation is governing non-human access rather than merely protecting files. The practical value is reducing the number of places where a secret can persist unnoticed and giving security teams a revocation path when misuse is suspected.

Practical implication: Treat secrets management as lifecycle governance and require revocation paths for every credential class.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Secrets sprawl is a governance failure before it is a tooling problem. The article shows that credentials spread across code, chat, and infrastructure faster than teams can inventory them. That creates an identity estate with no reliable boundary, where access is assumed rather than governed. For NHI programmes, the first question is not which vault to buy, but which credential classes are already outside policy control.

Credential visibility, not storage location, is the decisive control. A secret in a vault is only safe if teams can prove where every other copy lives and whether it is still valid. Sprawl breaks that assumption by creating shadow credentials in repositories, CI/CD systems, and collaboration platforms. The implication is that discovery and revocation are the real governance primitives, not repository hygiene alone.

Vault sprawl creates a fragmented trust model that behaves like multiple identity silos. When each team or environment manages secrets differently, the organisation loses consistent policy enforcement, auditability, and offboarding discipline. That fragmentation is especially damaging for NHI governance because machine credentials are often reused across workflows and services. Practitioners should read vault sprawl as a lifecycle and accountability problem, not a storage architecture preference.

Secret sprawl now sits at the intersection of human IAM and NHI governance. Humans create and approve the workflows, but the secrets are consumed by applications, pipelines, service accounts, and integrations. That makes this a cross-domain identity issue rather than a pure DevOps concern. Teams that separate human access review from non-human credential governance will keep missing the actual risk boundary.

Blind trust in private systems is the named concept here: private repositories are not safe by default. Secrets living in internal code, shared files, or collaboration tools still expand the attack surface because access is broader than intended and retention is longer than expected. The lesson for practitioners is straightforward: private does not mean controlled, and controlled does not mean revocable.

From our research:

• Internal repositories are 6x more likely to contain secrets than public ones (32.2% vs 5.6%), according to The State of Secrets Sprawl 2026.
• 64% of valid secrets leaked in 2022 are still valid and exploitable today, which is why detection without revocation leaves exposure intact.
• That pattern is explored further in the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge, which shows how teams lose control when secrets outgrow their governance model.

What this signals

Secret sprawl is becoming an identity lifecycle problem, not just a hygiene issue. As more workloads, integrations, and collaboration tools depend on credentials, teams need to manage secrets as living identities with issuance, usage, rotation, and revocation states. The governance gap is largest where development speed outruns inventory and offboarding discipline.

Runtime control is now more important than static storage policy. A secret that is stored securely but never revoked still becomes operationally dangerous once it is copied into pipelines or shared across teams. For practitioners, the practical next step is to align discovery and expiry with the same discipline used for privileged human access.

One useful way to frame the issue is secret trust debt: every unmanaged copy creates future work for detection, attribution, and containment. When a programme accumulates too many duplicated secrets, remediation becomes reactive and incomplete, even if the original vault design was sound.

For practitioners

• Inventory every secret-bearing location Scan repositories, CI/CD pipelines, collaboration tools, shared drives, and vaults as separate discovery domains. Build one inventory that records where each secret appears, who depends on it, and whether duplicates exist elsewhere.
• Centralise rotation and revocation policy Tie rotation windows and expiry rules to a single governance standard so the same credential class is not managed differently across teams or environments. Prioritise secrets with reuse across applications, because reuse increases blast radius.
• Eliminate hardcoded and plaintext secrets first Remove secrets from source code, YAML, spreadsheets, and chat threads before tuning vault architecture. If a credential can be copied into a file or message, it is already outside reliable lifecycle control.
• Review third-party and CI/CD exposures separately Treat integrations, build runners, and pipeline tokens as distinct NHI populations with their own offboarding and monitoring requirements. A compromised runner or SaaS integration can expose credentials even when application code is clean.

Key takeaways

• Secrets sprawl turns credentials into an unmanaged identity layer that expands attack surface and weakens accountability.
• The scale problem is visibility and revocation, because leaked or duplicated secrets often remain valid long after discovery.
• Practitioners should treat secret governance as lifecycle control across repositories, pipelines, collaboration tools, and vaults.

Key terms

• 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.
• Vault Sprawl: Vault sprawl is the uncontrolled growth of secret stores, vault instances, and duplicate credential repositories across an organisation. It creates fragmented access control, unclear ownership, and inconsistent rotation practices, which makes it difficult to prove where a secret lives or whether the authoritative copy is still in use.
• 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.

What's in the full article

Akeyless' full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• Specific examples of how its Universal Secrets Connector handles multiple vault environments without migration.
• Implementation guidance for automated rotation and expiration across cloud, CI/CD, and application workflows.
• The product's own view of how RBAC and audit logging fit into a centralized secrets governance model.
• Practical use cases for removing secrets from code, configuration files, and collaboration tools.

👉 Akeyless' full article covers the vault-sprawl use case, centralization model, and prevention approach in more detail.

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.