Aembit Brings Credential Lifecycle Management to GitLab Secretless CI/CD

Read full announcement here: https://aembit.io/press-release/aembit-extends-secretless-ci-cd-with-credential-lifecycle-management-for-gitlab/?source=nhimg

Aembit, the workload identity and access management (IAM) company, has introduced a new GitLab Catalog component that fundamentally changes how organizations secure CI/CD pipelines. Instead of relying on long-lived personal access tokens (PATs) and static secrets, Aembit now delivers short-lived, policy-controlled credentials that are created only when needed and revoked automatically.

This eliminates one of the most persistent risks in software delivery: unmanaged credentials lingering in code, configs, and repositories long after they should have expired.

Why This Matters

GitLab powers millions of pipelines worldwide, and its popularity has made it a prime target for attackers. Past breaches at organizations like Pearson and the Internet Archive have shown how exposed service accounts and PATs can be exploited to exfiltrate data and disrupt operations.

With Aembit Credential Lifecycle Management:

• Credentials exist only as long as a job requires them.
• Workload identity and MFA enforce strong, verifiable access.
• Service accounts are created and decommissioned on demand, eliminating unused accounts.
• Security teams gain clear audit trails of which workload accessed what, when, and under which conditions.

Seamless GitLab Integration

Aembit is now listed directly in the GitLab CI/CD Component Catalog, making adoption frictionless. Development teams can add Aembit to their pipelines without complex configuration or custom scripting.

“Developers want to move quickly without worrying about where a credential is stored or whether it needs to be rotated. Security teams want assurance that nothing is left exposed. What we’ve built satisfies both needs at once.”
— Kevin Sapp, Co-Founder & CTO, Aembit

Market Context: Why Now

• Machine Identities Explosion – Non-human identities (NHIs) already outnumber human identities by 45 to 1, creating massive governance challenges.
• Credential Abuse at Scale – The 2025 Verizon DBIR confirms credential theft remains a leading attack vector.
• Agentic AI Growth – Autonomous agents are multiplying the number of short-lived workloads that require secure, just-in-time access.

Traditional manual credential rotation cannot keep up. Aembit’s approach turns identity-driven, ephemeral credentials into the new standard.

Customer Impact

Organizations such as Snowflake have reported:

• Reduced time spent managing credentials.
• Lower operational disruptions from security incidents.
• Improved developer velocity by removing manual token handling.

Security teams gain automatic least privilege enforcement, while developers enjoy transparent provisioning and revocation — no extra coding, no manual steps.

Availability

Both GitLab Credential Lifecycle Management and the Aembit Edge GitLab component are available today. Enterprises can start with the Aembit Starter Tier and scale up to enterprise-grade policy enforcement, conditional access, and advanced reporting.

Bottom Line

This release represents more than a GitLab integration. It’s a paradigm shift in CI/CD security: from static, hard-to-manage secrets to dynamic, verifiable, and identity-first credentials.

Aembit gives organizations the missing control plane for securing non-human identities in pipelines and with GitLab as the entry point, adoption has never been simpler.