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12/05/2026 6:31 pm
TL;DR: Most organisations cannot reliably tell which human owns a leaked secret or non-human identity, and that slows triage, breaks remediation, and complicates audits when accounts outlive their creators, according to Entro Security. Human accountability is now a core control plane for NHI governance, not an administrative detail.
NHIMG editorial — based on research published by Entro Security.
By the numbers:
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams assign ownership for non-human identities?
A: Use a layered model that assigns a primary owner, a backup owner, and an operational administrator for each non-human identity.
Q: Why does ownership matter for leaked secrets and service accounts?
A: Ownership matters because remediation fails when teams can detect a secret but cannot find the human who can safely act on it.
Q: What is the difference between primary ownership and operational ownership?
A: Primary ownership usually identifies the person closest to the creation or business context of the NHI, while operational ownership identifies who can actually rotate, revoke, or maintain it in production.
Practitioner guidance
- Implement fallback ownership tiers Assign a primary owner, a runtime administrator, and an escalation owner for every NHI that can reach production, so incidents do not stall when the creator is absent.
- Reconcile ownership data across control planes Compare IdP records, cloud IAM policies, source control, and ticketing data on a regular schedule to catch orphaned secrets and stale service accounts before exposure becomes persistent.
- Tie revocation decisions to operational context Build playbooks that let responders see whether a secret belongs to a mission-critical workload, a shared pipeline, or an abandoned application before they rotate or revoke it.
When teams cannot reliably identify who can act on an exposed credential, they also cannot enforce lifecycle control, access review, or incident closure with confidence?
👉 Read Entro Security's analysis of NHI ownership attribution and remediation →
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12/05/2026 6:31 pm
A few things worth adding from our research at NHI Mgmt Group.
Ownership attribution is now a control requirement, not an administrative convenience. When a secret is exposed, the delay usually comes from uncertainty about who can take action, not from the lack of detection. That makes ownership a prerequisite for effective remediation, access review, and offboarding. Organisations that cannot map NHIs to humans are operating with a structural governance blind spot.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which means ownership gaps often begin long before remediation starts.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Should organisations include ownership checks in offboarding workflows?
A: Yes. Offboarding should include API keys, tokens, certificates, and service accounts because those identities can survive personnel changes and continue accessing systems. If ownership is not reviewed during exit processes, stale access can remain active long after the human relationship ends.
👉 Read our full editorial: NHI ownership attribution closes the human accountability gap
