How can organisations reduce hidden privilege in service accounts and tokens?

Why Hidden Privilege Persists in Service Accounts and Tokens

Hidden privilege usually survives because service account are created for one project, then reused across tools, pipelines, and environments long after the original need changes. That creates an access layer that is hard to see and even harder to retire. The result is not just excessive permission, but invisible permission that accumulates in secrets stores, CI/CD systems, and collaboration tools. NHIMG research shows the scale of the problem: 44% of NHI tokens are exposed in the wild, and secret sprawl makes that exposure harder to contain once it begins.

The core issue is that many organisations still treat non-human access as a setup task instead of a lifecycle. A token with broad scope, long TTL, and no clear owner is effectively standing privilege, even if it looks temporary on paper. Best practice is to pair inventory with ownership, scope review, and revocation discipline. Current guidance from OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is clear that unmanaged NHI credentials are a recurring exposure point. In practice, many security teams discover hidden privilege only after a token has already been reused in a place it was never meant to reach.

How to Reduce Privilege in Practice

Start by mapping every service account and token to a real workload, a named owner, and a specific business purpose. If an identity cannot be tied to a system and a responsible team, it is already a governance gap. From there, reduce standing permissions and replace broad roles with narrowly scoped access that reflects the exact operation required. For human administrators, OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge both point to the same operational truth: discovery alone is not enough without enforcement.

• Use just-in-time access for elevated actions, not permanent admin rights.
• Shorten token lifetime and prefer ephemeral secrets over long-lived static credentials.
• Separate read, write, and deploy permissions so one leaked token cannot do everything.
• Track where tokens are stored and transmitted, including tickets, chat, logs, and build output.
• Revoke tokens automatically on offboarding, pipeline replacement, or ownership change.

For implementation, use workload identity and policy evaluation at request time rather than relying on static role assignment alone. That means cryptographic identity for the workload, plus conditional authorisation based on context such as environment, target system, and task purpose. Where teams have mature PAM, the goal is not just vaulting secrets, but making elevation temporary, logged, and approval-bound. This approach is reinforced by the Salesloft OAuth token breach, which shows how a compromised token can become a broad access path when scope is too generous. These controls tend to break down when service accounts are shared across multiple applications because ownership, context, and blast radius all become ambiguous.

Where the Standard Guidance Breaks Down

Tighter token controls often increase operational overhead, so organisations have to balance reduced blast radius against pipeline friction and developer experience. That tradeoff becomes most visible in legacy environments, cross-functional automation, and high-frequency release pipelines where teams resist short TTLs because refresh logic is missing or brittle. In those settings, the answer is not to keep broad privileges forever, but to fix the identity design so automation can function without standing access.

There is no universal standard for this yet, especially for systems that mix human-operated admin tools with autonomous workflows. Current guidance suggests treating these identities as dynamic workloads rather than static accounts, which means revisiting the access model whenever the system behaviour changes. A common failure mode is duplicated credentials across multiple stores, because one leaked secret can then outlive the system that created it. That pattern is visible in breach reporting such as the Cisco Active Directory credentials breach and the JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure. The practical lesson is simple: reduce privilege at issuance, not after exposure.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How can organisations reduce the risk from compromised service accounts and tokens?
• When should organisations prioritise Zero Standing Privilege for non-human identities?
• Why do Active Directory service accounts complicate zero trust programs?
• How can organisations govern AI agents that use service accounts and tokens?