Zero Standing Privileges vs Credential Vaulting — Rethinking Privileged Access in a Zero Trust World

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Achieving Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP)—a state where no user or system account has ongoing access unless actively performing a task—has become a defining goal for modern cybersecurity teams. Traditional Privileged Access Management (PAM) practices centered on credential vaulting once served as the gold standard for controlling administrative passwords, SSH keys, and API tokens. However, as enterprises shift toward identity-based access control and Zero Trust architectures, vaults are increasingly seen as a limitation rather than a safeguard.

This analysis explores whether vault-centric PAM strategies truly align with Zero Standing Privileges principles—or simply relocate the same risks under a different form of management.

Traditional vault-based PAM secures credentials by storing and rotating secrets, yet still relies on persistent privileged accounts. Each credential in a vault represents a window of standing privilege that can be exploited if compromised. Reports such as CISA’s FY23 Risk & Vulnerability Assessments reveal that over 40% of successful cyberattacks exploited valid privileged accounts. In this context, vaults can unintentionally expand the attack surface by concentrating control in one highly targeted location.

Vault-based systems also struggle with scalability and human error. Misconfigured rotation schedules, missed revocations, and manual credential check-outs introduce operational friction and compliance risks. As the number of non-human identities—including service accounts, APIs, and AI agents—continues to outpace human users, vaults cannot fully eliminate the existence of long-lived credentials, even when managing them securely. Furthermore, accountability challenges persist: vault logs reveal who retrieved a secret but rarely who actually used it, creating visibility gaps in AI-driven and Model Context Protocol (MCP) environments.

The rise of vault-free PAM and identity-based access control is changing this paradigm. Instead of storing and rotating secrets, access is granted dynamically through short-lived, identity-bound certificates or tokens that expire automatically once a task is complete. This architecture eliminates standing privileges entirely—there are no passwords or SSH keys to steal, and no vault to compromise.

Platforms like Teleport operationalize this principle by replacing static credentials with ephemeral X.509 certificates tied directly to a verified identity—human, machine, or AI agent. Every session is authenticated, time-limited, and cryptographically bound to the user or workload performing the action. The result is continuous least-privilege enforcement, minimal administrative overhead, and full identity-level auditability of every connection across hybrid and cloud-native infrastructure.

By removing vault dependencies, organizations can scale Zero Standing Privileges across thousands of identities without relying on constant credential rotation or manual control. Security teams gain real-time visibility into who accessed what, when, and why—closing the accountability and persistence gaps left open by legacy PAM systems.

Key Takeaway

Credential vaults mitigate some risks but cannot achieve true Zero Standing Privileges because they preserve the existence of static credentials and persistent access. A vault-free, certificate-based model replaces stored secrets with ephemeral, identity-verified access—eliminating the root cause of standing privilege risk and aligning with modern Zero Trust and AI-driven infrastructure security principles.