How should security teams reduce secret sprawl in machine identities?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Secret sprawl is not just an inventory problem. In machine identity environments, every extra API key, token, certificate, or hard-coded credential expands the blast radius, adds renewal debt, and creates another place where revocation can fail. NHI research shows how often this becomes operationally real: 96% of organisations store secrets outside secrets managers in vulnerable locations such as code, config files, and CI/CD tools, and 79% have experienced secrets leaks. The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 frames this as a lifecycle and exposure problem, not a one-time cleanup exercise.

For teams trying to reduce sprawl, the key mistake is treating secrets as isolated artefacts instead of managed identity dependencies. Once a secret appears in a pipeline variable, a developer laptop, a shared wiki, or an automation script, it is no longer governed by a single control point. The better model is to minimise standing credentials, shorten their lifetime, and make issuance conditional on runtime need. That is why the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge matters alongside the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10: both point to the same operational reality, which is that scattered credentials fail fastest when no one can prove where they live or who owns them. In practice, many security teams encounter secret sprawl only after a pipeline leak or supply chain incident has already exposed the credential chain.

How It Works in Practice

Reducing secret sprawl starts with discovery, but discovery must be followed by lifecycle control. Security teams should map secrets across source control, build systems, orchestration platforms, vaults, tickets, chat tools, and endpoint environments, then classify each secret by owner, purpose, environment, and expiry. High-risk cases are the easiest to prioritise: long-lived credentials embedded in code, shared service account passwords, and keys that never rotate. NHI guidance from NHI Management Group shows why this matters, since 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames and 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after notification, which means exposure often persists long after detection.

The practical pattern is to replace static secrets wherever possible with runtime-bound identity and short-lived issuance. That includes:

• moving from stored API keys to workload identity with short-lived tokens;
• issuing JIT credentials only when a task is approved and active;
• enforcing automatic revocation on job completion, timeout, or failure;
• using vault policy, CI/CD policy, and code scanning together so removal is continuous, not episodic.

This approach also needs attribution and traceability. A secret should not exist unless a system owner can explain why it exists, where it is used, and how it will be retired. For real-world breach patterns, the Shai Hulud npm malware campaign and the Reviewdog GitHub Action supply chain attack show how quickly secrets spread when automation trusts whatever is already present. The current guidance suggests pairing secrets reduction with zero standing privilege and strong offboarding, but there is no universal standard for exactly how many secret sources should be scanned in each environment. These controls tend to break down when ephemeral build runners and developer-managed tooling sit outside central policy enforcement because discovery becomes incomplete.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter secret controls often increase delivery overhead, so organisations must balance lower exposure against the friction of reissuing credentials, updating dependencies, and coordinating platform changes. That tradeoff is especially visible in legacy systems, third-party integrations, and vendor-managed automation where short-lived identity is not fully supported.

In those environments, best practice is evolving rather than settled. Some teams can adopt dynamic secrets quickly in cloud-native pipelines, while others must keep a small set of long-lived credentials temporarily and wrap them with compensating controls such as vault mediation, strict RBAC, explicit expiry, and continuous monitoring. The important distinction is between unavoidable exceptions and unmanaged sprawl. If a secret must remain static, it should still have an owner, a defined business purpose, a renewal date, and a tested revocation path.

Another common edge case is collaboration tooling. Teams often focus on code and vaults while missing tokens pasted into chat, ticket comments, or incident response notes. The CI/CD pipeline exploitation case study and the 52 NHI Breaches Analysis both show that attackers do not care where a secret was intended to live, only where it can still be used. For implementation discipline, the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 remains a useful baseline, but current guidance suggests supplementing it with environment-specific policy and revocation testing rather than assuming one control set fits all. In practice, secret sprawl persists longest in hybrid estates where ownership is split across platform, app, and security teams.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should security teams decide whether JIT access is safe for non-human identities?
• How should teams reduce the attack surface of Active Directory identities?
• How should security teams reduce standing privilege in hybrid environments?
• How should teams secure non-human identities across cloud and SaaS?