Who is accountable when exposed container images contain secrets and credentials?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Exposed container images that contain secrets are not just a build hygiene issue. They are a trust-model failure that can turn a registry into a credential distribution channel. If an image can be pulled by the wrong party, embedded API keys, tokens, and certificates may be replayed before the team even notices. That is why accountability spans the registry owner, the CI or build pipeline owner, the application team, and identity governance together, not one group in isolation.

The risk is well established in broader secrets research. NHI Management Group’s Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge shows how fragmented secret handling undermines control, while OWASP’s OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 treats unmanaged machine credentials as a systemic risk rather than a one-off leak. In practice, many security teams discover the accountability gap only after the image has already been deployed, pulled externally, and the embedded credentials have been used for access.

How It Works in Practice

Operational accountability usually follows the control point that failed, then expands to the teams that enabled it. If the registry allowed anonymous pulls, platform engineering owns the exposure path. If secrets were baked into the image during build, the application or release engineering team owns the leak source. If the credentials were issued without adequate lifecycle controls, identity and secrets governance own the issuance and revocation gap. Current guidance suggests treating this as shared accountability with clearly assigned remediation tasks, rather than arguing over a single owner after the fact.

In practice, the response should cover both containment and root-cause correction:

• Invalidate or rotate every exposed secret, token, certificate, and API key.
• Rebuild images from clean sources and remove secrets from the image layers and history.
• Restrict registry access so images cannot be pulled anonymously unless that is an explicit, reviewed decision.
• Review CI/CD variables, artifact promotion, and secret injection so credentials are never persisted in the image.
• Document which team approved the trust model and which team is responsible for each control failure.

This is where NHI governance becomes practical. The issue is not only that secrets exist, but that their lifecycle is detached from the systems that distribute them. NHI Management Group’s 52 NHI Breaches Analysis and the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Static vs Dynamic Secrets both reinforce the same operational lesson: static secrets embedded in reusable artifacts are hard to govern and easy to abuse. These controls tend to break down in fast-moving CI/CD environments where image promotion is automated but secret revocation is still manual.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter registry controls often increase operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance release velocity against exposure reduction. That tradeoff becomes sharper when images are shared across business units, mirrored into multiple registries, or used in disconnected environments where offline pulls are normal. There is no universal standard for this yet, but current best practice is to make the trust decision explicit and to preserve an audit trail showing who accepted it.

Edge cases change accountability but do not remove it. If a third-party base image already contains secrets, the consuming team still has a duty to detect and block it before deployment. If a contractor or platform vendor manages the registry, the internal owner still remains accountable for governance, review, and incident response. If the exposed credential is a long-lived service account key, the remediation burden is higher than for a short-lived token because the blast radius is larger and discovery is slower. The practical lesson is simple: a secret in an image is always a governance failure, even when multiple teams contributed to it.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How do organisations reduce the dwell time of exposed credentials at scale?
• Who is accountable when shadow AI uses corporate credentials to process sensitive data?
• Why do collaboration tools create such a large secrets risk?
• Why do leaked secrets remain such a persistent NHI risk?