When should manufacturers prioritize passwordless access?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Manufacturers do not adopt passwordless access just to reduce help desk tickets. The real driver is operational trust: when operators, contractors, and technicians share passwords or reuse credentials across terminals, access becomes hard to attribute and even harder to revoke. In connected plants, that problem is amplified because the same identity can influence both physical entry points and production systems. Current guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs shows that identity sprawl and weak secret handling are common failure points, especially where OT and IT converge.

For manufacturers, passwordless is most compelling where authentication friction translates directly into unsafe workarounds, such as shared badges, cached passwords on shared terminals, or local admin accounts that never get removed. It also strengthens auditability because each login can be tied to a device, a user, and a context rather than a memorized secret. That matters when plants need to prove who approved a change, who entered a restricted area, or who accessed a maintenance console. In practice, many security teams encounter these failures only after a contractor account is reused or a plant-floor credential is copied, rather than through intentional design.

How It Works in Practice

Passwordless access in manufacturing usually means replacing reusable passwords with phishing-resistant authentication such as FIDO2 security keys, platform passkeys, smartcards, or certificate-based login. The operational goal is not convenience alone. It is to bind authentication to a person and a trusted device, then reduce the lifespan and portability of the secret. For shared terminals, this often works best when paired with fast session timeout, step-up authentication for privileged actions, and role checks that reflect line-side duties rather than broad IT roles.

Strong implementations also separate human authentication from machine access. A technician may sign in without a password, but the PLC, MES, or CMMS system should still enforce least privilege, time-bound access, and logging. That distinction matters because passwordless for humans does not solve service account sprawl. NHI Management Group’s 52 NHI Breaches Analysis and the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks both reinforce that secrets and non-human credentials remain a major attack path, even when human logins improve.

• Use passwordless for shared workstations, remote support, and privileged plant access first.
• Prefer phishing-resistant factors over SMS or one-time passwords.
• Pair login with device posture, location, and session risk checks where feasible.
• Keep emergency break-glass access, but isolate it and review it aggressively.

Current guidance suggests rolling out passwordless where repeated authentication slows operations or where a single compromised password would create cross-domain impact. These controls tend to break down in brownfield plants with legacy OT systems that only accept username and password, because integration can require proxies, federation bridges, or compensating controls.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter authentication often increases deployment overhead, so organisations need to balance assurance against uptime, device management, and contractor turnover. That tradeoff is especially visible in plants with mixed generations of equipment, offline stations, and vendors who need temporary access. In those environments, passwordless may need to start at the enterprise edge and extend inward over time rather than replacing every login at once.

There is no universal standard for every manufacturing use case yet, but best practice is evolving toward passwordless for high-friction, high-consequence access while preserving narrow fallback paths for exceptions. A mature program also distinguishes human passwordless from service identity governance, since a secure operator login does not protect API keys, machine certificates, or shared integration accounts. The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is useful here because it keeps the focus on credential lifecycle, not just user sign-in.

One practical signal that passwordless should move up the roadmap is when supervisors are already bypassing controls to keep production moving. That is usually the point where security and operations are both paying for password friction, just in different ways.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• What breaks when passwordless relies on weak emergency access methods?
• How should manufacturers secure shared workstations that access CUI systems?
• Why do ephemeral credentials still leave risk in machine access models?
• What should IAM teams watch when rolling out passwordless login?