Who is accountable for securing non-human identities across ownership, rotation, and revocation?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Accountability for NHI security is not a paperwork issue. It determines whether a workload token is rotated before exposure, whether a revoked integration is actually disabled, and whether an orphaned secret stays live long after the business owner has moved on. Current guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide both point to the same operational truth: lifecycle ownership must be explicit, or controls decay into cleanup work after exposure or outage.

The risk is amplified by scale and duplication. NHIs are often shared across apps, hard-coded into automation, or left active after project transitions, which makes it difficult to know who can approve rotation or trigger revocation. In Entro Security’s 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity, 91% of former employee tokens remained active after offboarding, showing how quickly lifecycle gaps become an exposure problem. In practice, many security teams encounter stale NHIs only after a migration, audit finding, or incident has already exposed the ownership gap.

How It Works in Practice

The cleanest operating model assigns the workload or application team as the business owner, while security, identity operations, and platform engineering provide policy, tooling, and oversight. That split matters because the team closest to the integration is usually the only one that can judge when an NHI is still needed, but the central teams are better positioned to enforce standards, monitor drift, and require evidence of rotation and revocation. NIST guidance on privileged control discipline, especially NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls, supports this kind of shared accountability with explicit control ownership.

In practice, mature programs define three separate responsibilities:

• Ownership: the application or platform team approves whether the NHI exists and what it is allowed to reach.
• Rotation: identity or security operations enforce key and secret renewal intervals, ideally through automation and short-lived credentials.
• Revocation: the service owner or change owner confirms decommissioning, while central tooling removes access and validates closure.

That operating model should be backed by a lifecycle register, ticketing workflow, and evidence that links every NHI to a named owner, a business purpose, and a review date. It also helps to align this with the guidance in NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs - Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs and the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge, because duplicated secrets and scattered ownership usually fail together. These controls tend to break down when the NHI is embedded in CI/CD pipelines or legacy integrations because no single team can safely pause the pipeline without a documented owner.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter ownership often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster delivery against stronger accountability. That tradeoff is real for shared services, vendor integrations, and platform-generated identities, where there is no universal standard for this yet and the governance model must fit the environment rather than a generic org chart.

For example, a centrally managed service account used by many teams should not be treated like a personal developer token. Shared identities need stricter approval and review, but each consuming team should still be accountable for the access it depends on. Likewise, ephemeral workload credentials can reduce revocation risk, yet they do not remove the need for an explicit owner who confirms the integration still exists. Current guidance suggests pairing technical controls with a named human owner for every NHI, even when the credential is short-lived.

Edge cases also appear during offboarding, mergers, and incident response. A revoked human account does not automatically mean the related service token can be removed, and a rotated secret does not prove the old one has disappeared everywhere it was copied. NHIMG’s Top 10 NHI Issues shows why lifecycle gaps, secret sprawl, and overused identities often reinforce one another, while the OWASP NHI guidance remains the clearest reference for assigning ownership without assuming the platform will clean itself up.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• Who is accountable for securing non-human identities across onboarding, rotation, and offboarding?
• Who is accountable for governing blended identities across human, non-human, and AI access?
• Who should be accountable for cloud identity governance when both developers and non-human identities need access?
• How should financial institutions monitor privilege chains across human and non-human identities?