OWASP Guide: Securing Agentic AI Apps with Secrets & NHI Governance

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Learn key takeaways from OWASP’s Agentic Applications Guide — secrets management, NHI security, JIT access, and runtime observability for AI workflows.

On July 28, 2025, OWASP released the Securing Agentic Applications Guide v1.0, establishing a crucial security framework for developers and AppSec teams building agentic AI applications, large language model (LLM) agents, and MCP servers. The guide emphasizes that as agentic workflows evolve, robust secrets management and non-human identity (NHI) governance must become foundational security practices.

Key takeaways for AppSec and security teams include:

1. Secure Secrets Management Starts at Design - Avoid hardcoding secrets. Use environment variables, dependency injection, and dedicated secrets managers like AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault.

2. Adopt Just-in-Time (JIT) Access & Short-Lived Credentials - Minimize secret misuse windows by favoring temporary tokens (AWS STS, GCP IAM) over long-lived keys.

3. Use Managed Identity Services & Granular RBAC - Implement IAM roles, Azure Managed Identities, and enforce strict RBAC with fine-grained read/write separation.

4. Manage NHIs with Human-Grade Rigor - Each agent or service requires a unique identity, secured through provisioning, credential rotation, and de-provisioning workflows.

5. Enhance Runtime Observability & Anomaly Detection - Continuously monitor agent behaviors, scan prompts and tool calls for policy violations, and integrate with SIEM for proactive threat detection.

The guide’s emphasis on NHI security, secrets hygiene, and runtime observability reflects the growing attack surface as agentic AI systems scale.

Entro helps organizations operationalize OWASP’s recommendations by automating secrets discovery, NHI lifecycle management, and behavioral anomaly detection through its NHIDR™ engine — enabling teams to deploy agentic AI workflows securely and efficiently.