Ownership should sit with the identity or security team that governs other non-human credentials, not with tooling admins alone. These tokens authorize API access and should be treated as part of the organisation’s NHI inventory, scope management, and offboarding process.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
MCP credential governance is not a tooling admin concern; it is an identity control concern because those tokens grant software access to systems, data, and downstream secrets. Once an MCP token is created outside the normal identity lifecycle, it often escapes inventory, review, and revocation discipline. That creates a gap between the team that configures the server and the team accountable for access risk. Current guidance in the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and NHIMG research both point to the same operational issue: unmanaged non-human credentials become hidden standing privilege.
This matters even more when MCP is used by autonomous or semi-autonomous agents. Those workloads do not behave like static service accounts with predictable call patterns. They request tools dynamically, chain actions, and can expose credentials if governance is weak. NHIMG’s AI Agents: The New Attack Surface report found that 80% of organisations report AI agents have already performed actions beyond intended scope. In practice, many security teams encounter MCP exposure only after a token has already been overused, reused, or copied into a second workflow, rather than through intentional access governance.
How It Works in Practice
Ownership should sit with the identity or security function that already governs other non-human identities, with clear operational input from platform and tooling teams. That means the identity owner defines issuance, naming, scope, rotation, revocation, and offboarding rules; platform owners implement the control points inside the MCP server or client; and application teams request access through a governed process rather than creating ad hoc tokens.
The practical model is to treat MCP credentials like any other workload identity artifact. In mature environments, this includes an inventory record, a business purpose, an owning system, a service or agent bound to the token, and an expiry policy. For autonomous workloads, best practice is moving toward short-lived credentials and just-in-time issuance rather than long-lived static tokens. NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Static vs Dynamic Secrets and Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs both reinforce that lifecycle ownership is the control that keeps non-human access from becoming permanent privilege.
- Use a single identity owner for policy, review, and revocation decisions.
- Register every MCP token in the NHI inventory with system, purpose, and expiry.
- Issue credentials per workload or per task when the platform supports it.
- Revoke access automatically when the agent, integration, or environment is decommissioned.
- Log token use centrally so security can detect scope creep and reuse.
Where possible, pair credential governance with workload identity and policy-as-code so the token is only one part of the authorization decision. That approach aligns with NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 expectations for managed access and continuous oversight, and it is consistent with emerging MCP security practice. These controls tend to break down in decentralised engineering environments where each product team can mint its own tokens without a shared inventory or revocation path.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter credential governance often increases friction for developers and platform teams, requiring organisations to balance speed of integration against access assurance. That tradeoff becomes visible when MCP is embedded in internal developer tools, agent runtimes, or experiment sandboxes, where teams may argue that short-lived tokens are too operationally expensive. Current guidance suggests the opposite: the more dynamic the workload, the more important lifecycle control becomes.
There is no universal standard for MCP ownership yet, but the safest pattern is a federated one with central identity policy and local technical implementation. Security or IAM should own the policy, exceptions, and audits. Platform engineering may operate the MCP infrastructure. Tool owners may request access, but they should not be the final authority for token issuance or revocation. That distinction is especially important when MCP is used by autonomous agents, because agent behaviour can change at runtime and reveal access paths that were never anticipated during initial design.
NHIMG’s Top 10 NHI Issues and Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge are useful reminders that ownership gaps usually surface as secret sprawl, duplicate credentials, and missing offboarding. In those cases, the question is not whether the token was created correctly, but whether anyone still owns its lifecycle once the first deployment is live.
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 and OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while 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 | Token lifecycle and rotation are central to MCP credential governance. |
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | A2 | Agent tool access and credential misuse are core risks for MCP-based agents. |
| NIST AI RMF | Governance accountability is required for autonomous systems using MCP tokens. |
Assign one owner for each MCP token and enforce inventory, rotation, and revocation on a set schedule.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
