Better Secrets Management Begins with Securing Machine Identities

Read full article here: https://blog.gitguardian.com/securing-your-machine-identities/?utm_source=nhimg

In the 2025 State of Secrets Sprawl Report by GitGuardian, over 24 million secrets were detected in public GitHub repositories—an alarming increase from 19 million the previous year. This surge underscores one critical truth: machine identities and plaintext credentials are spiraling out of control. API keys, tokens, and service credentials have become the lifeblood of cloud-native applications, connecting workloads, containers, and pipelines across distributed environments. Yet, these same credentials now represent one of the biggest attack surfaces in modern cybersecurity.

The Rise of Machine Identities

Machine identities—credentials that authenticate services, workloads, and devices—outnumber human identities by more than 45 to 1, according to CyberArk. Each machine, from IoT sensors to microservices, needs a secure and verifiable identity to operate. However, the proliferation of static keys, long-lived tokens, and embedded credentials has led to uncontrolled secrets sprawl across codebases, repositories, and collaboration tools like Jira, Slack, and Confluence.

Industry leaders, including Gartner and Venafi, define machine identities as any digital credential (API keys, TLS certificates, SSH keys, or code-signing certificates) that proves legitimacy in machine-to-machine communication. These identities are essential—but dangerously easy to leak, mismanage, or forget.

From Passwords to Tokens: How We Got Here

In the early days of computing, authentication was simple: users had passwords, and systems trusted whoever entered them correctly. But as automation, APIs, and distributed applications evolved, this model broke. Machines began to talk to other machines—often using static passwords or tokens embedded directly in code.
Today, attackers exploit these credentials to move laterally, exfiltrate data, and gain long-term persistence. Hard-coded secrets have replaced stolen passwords as the primary entry point for modern supply chain attacks.

Discovery and Inventory: The Foundation of Machine Identity Management

Before an organization can protect its machine identities, it must first discover and inventory every credential it uses. This includes API tokens in code repositories, SSH keys in build servers, certificates in cloud workloads, and embedded credentials in container images.
GitGuardian’s platform has revealed that specific secrets like API keys vastly outnumber generic credentials, confirming that organizations are losing visibility into the credentials powering their automation.

A modern machine identity management program must include:

• Continuous, automated discovery across all environments
• Classification by type, owner, and expiration date
• Integration with cloud and DevOps systems for ongoing visibility
  Without this foundation, automated rotation and Zero Trust enforcement are impossible.

Zero Trust for Machine-to-Machine Authentication

As organizations transition to microservices and multi-cloud architectures, perimeter-based security no longer applies. A Zero Trust approach treats every machine identity as potentially compromised and enforces continuous verification.
Key practices include:

• Mutual TLS (mTLS) for service-to-service encryption and authentication
• Short-lived certificates that rotate automatically at runtime
• OAuth 2.0 client credentials flow for secure API-to-API communication
• Behavioral monitoring of identity usage patterns to detect anomalies

This model reduces the attack window for compromised credentials and prevents attackers from exploiting static tokens for persistence.

The Case for Automated Secrets Rotation

One of GitGuardian’s most alarming findings: over 90% of valid secrets found publicly were still usable five days later. This persistence proves that most organizations still rely on manual rotation—an unscalable, error-prone process.
Mature organizations instead adopt automated rotation policies, using tools such as CyberArk Conjur, AWS Secrets Manager, or HashiCorp Vault. These solutions integrate directly with CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure, ensuring that secrets are rotated or revoked as soon as exposure occurs.

GitGuardian’s integration project Brimstone with CyberArk automates this workflow—detecting exposed secrets, identifying whether they already exist in Conjur, and triggering automatic rotation or revocation. This is the future of machine identity hygiene at scale.

Integrating Discovery, Rotation, and Zero Trust

To secure machine identities effectively, organizations must unify discovery, governance, and rotation in a continuous lifecycle:

1. Discover – Map every credential across source code, containers, and clouds.
2. Classify – Identify ownership, purpose, and sensitivity.
3. Rotate – Automate expiration and replacement using integrated tools.
4. Monitor – Detect anomalies in credential usage or privilege escalation.
5. Decommission – Retire orphaned or unused credentials before they become risks.

Each stage reduces exposure time and brings visibility into an environment where thousands of machine identities operate simultaneously.

From Secrets Sprawl to Secrets Governance

Machine identities and secrets management are no longer niche security functions—they are foundational to enterprise resilience. The secrets sprawl problem is not just about leaked tokens; it’s about the lack of governance over what machines exist, what they access, and how long their credentials remain valid.
By combining continuous discovery, Zero Trust principles, and automated rotation, organizations can replace chaos with control and build a future where machine authentication is secure, measurable, and trustworthy.

Key Takeaways

• Machine identities are exploding—outnumbering human accounts by 45:1.
• Secrets sprawl is a measurable, growing crisis with over 24 million credentials leaked in 2025 alone.
• Discovery and classification are mandatory first steps before automation.
• Zero Trust authentication must extend to machines, not just users.
• Automation is the differentiator between secrets chaos and sustainable control.

Conclusion

Securing your machine identities is no longer optional—it’s a core component of cyber resilience. The next evolution of identity management will not be about who your users are, but what your systems are doing, what credentials they hold, and how well those identities are governed.
GitGuardian and CyberArk’s combined efforts show what’s possible when security moves beyond detection to proactive, automated defense.

In 2025 and beyond, the organizations that thrive will be those that understand every machine, every secret, and every connection that defines their digital fabric. Secrets management is no longer a DevOps hygiene task—it’s an identity security imperative.