Security teams should govern them as one lifecycle problem. The credential, the identity, and the runtime permission should all have the same owner, the same revocation path, and the same audit trail. If those elements are split across different teams or tools, exposure lasts longer and accountability becomes harder to prove.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Secrets and machine identities fail fastest when they are treated as separate programs. A token, certificate, API key, or service account only becomes useful to an attacker when its lifecycle outlives the workload that needs it. That is why the practical question is not merely where secrets are stored, but whether identity creation, privilege assignment, rotation, and revocation are governed as one control surface.
The exposure pattern is well documented in NHIMG research. The Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge shows how quickly unmanaged secrets accumulate across tools, teams, and pipelines, while the 52 NHI Breaches Analysis illustrates how compromised machine identities often become the path from initial access to broader lateral movement. NIST also frames identity as a core security control in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, which is a useful reminder that credential hygiene alone is not enough if runtime permission is not equally governed.
In practice, many security teams discover the break in control only after a leaked credential has already been reused across systems and the audit trail no longer proves who could revoke it.
How It Works in Practice
Governing secrets and machine identities together means building one workflow for issuance, distribution, use, rotation, and retirement. The identity primitive should be the workload itself, not the static secret that workload happens to carry. That is why many mature programs align certificate issuance, secret injection, and policy enforcement around the same service owner and the same source of truth.
A workable model usually includes four steps:
- Register the workload or service account as a machine identity with a clear owner and business purpose.
- Issue short-lived secrets or certificates only when the workload needs them, then revoke them automatically at task completion.
- Bind access to policy at runtime so the permission is evaluated in context, not granted forever by a broad role.
- Log secret use, identity use, and revocation in a single audit path for incident response and compliance.
For implementation guidance, the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is useful for understanding where machine identity controls fail, while the Ultimate Guide to NHIs -- Static vs Dynamic Secrets explains why long-lived static credentials are especially difficult to govern. The control objective is simple: if the identity is revoked, the secret should stop working immediately, and if the secret is rotated, the identity record should still reflect the active runtime authority.
Teams also need a common owner for exceptions. Otherwise, platform teams manage certificates, application teams manage API keys, and security teams only see the problem after exposure. These controls tend to break down in polyglot CI/CD environments because each pipeline service invents its own credential path and revocation behavior.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter control often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster delivery against stronger revocation discipline. That tradeoff is most visible in legacy systems, shared service accounts, and vendor integrations where short-lived credentials are hard to support.
Best practice is evolving, but current guidance suggests treating exceptions as temporary, documented, and measurable rather than allowing them to become parallel identity systems. In some environments, such as embedded services, air-gapped systems, or third-party platforms with limited token TTL support, teams may need compensating controls like tighter network segmentation, stronger monitoring, and manual approval for renewal.
Another edge case is duplicated secrets. NHIMG research in the 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity reports that 62% of secrets are duplicated across multiple locations, which makes single-point revocation harder and increases exposure. That is where central inventory matters as much as cryptography. Security leaders should still align with the NIST identity model, but there is no universal standard for this yet on how every organisation should unify vaulting, workload identity, and app-owner accountability across heterogeneous platforms.
When teams cannot unify the lifecycle, the safer fallback is to reduce standing secrets wherever possible and make revocation the default rather than the exception.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | Covers secret lifecycle and rotation issues central to shared governance. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Addresses access enforcement for machine identities and service permissions. |
| NIST AI RMF | GOVERN | Supports accountable lifecycle governance for autonomous and machine-driven access. |
Map workload identities to least-privilege access and review runtime permissions continuously.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on July 4, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
