Who should own zero-knowledge secrets governance in an enterprise?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Zero-knowledge secrets change the trust model, but they do not remove accountability. If a provider cannot decrypt the material, that only means the enterprise must be more disciplined about who can retrieve it, under what conditions, and how those decisions are audited. The ownership question matters because secrets governance still spans policy, lifecycle, approvals, and incident evidence.

This is where gaps usually appear. Security teams often assume a “zero-knowledge” design implies shared responsibility for governance, while platform teams assume the vendor owns the hard parts. The result is unclear control ownership, weak exception handling, and poor recovery evidence when access needs to be reviewed after an incident. NHI Management Group’s Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge frames this as an enterprise visibility problem, not just a tooling problem. The risk is amplified by secret exposure patterns documented in The State of Secrets Sprawl 2025.

Current guidance from the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 both point toward defined ownership, enforceable access control, and auditable governance for machine-held credentials. In practice, many security teams encounter failures only after a rotation miss, an insider access dispute, or a breach review has already exposed the ownership gap.

How It Works in Practice

Enterprise ownership should sit with the customer, not the zero-knowledge provider, because the provider cannot make business decisions about access risk, retention, segregation of duties, or revocation timing. That usually means security defines the policy, IAM enforces who may request access, and the platform team implements the retrieval path, logging, and integration points. The provider supplies secure storage or cryptographic services, but the enterprise owns the control plane.

Practically, the governance model should separate three layers. First is policy: which identities, workloads, or roles may request a secret. Second is lifecycle: how secrets are created, rotated, expired, and revoked. Third is evidence: what was accessed, by whom, for what purpose, and whether an approval or ticket existed. This is especially important for NHI programs, where the secret is often attached to a workload identity rather than a human user. NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs and Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Static vs Dynamic Secrets both reinforce that lifecycle ownership is the enterprise responsibility, even when the secret itself is never exposed to the provider.

• Define a named control owner for policy and exception approval.
• Bind retrieval to workload identity, not shared accounts or ad hoc tickets.
• Prefer ephemeral, JIT access with short TTLs and automatic revocation.
• Log all retrieval events into SIEM and retain evidence for audit and forensics.

For implementation, teams should align governance to request-time evaluation, not just static role assignment, and preserve separation between storage trust and access trust. These controls tend to break down in highly automated CI/CD environments because secrets are often copied into build steps, caches, or ephemeral runners before ownership checks are consistently enforced.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter control ownership often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance speed of delivery against review depth and auditability. That tradeoff is real, especially when platform teams want self-service and security teams want approval gates.

There is no universal standard for this yet, but current guidance suggests a few patterns. In regulated environments, security often owns policy and evidence retention, while platform engineering owns implementation and day-to-day reliability. In smaller organisations, a combined security-operations function may own the full lifecycle if there is enough segregation of duties to prevent self-approval. In both models, the provider should never become the policy authority simply because the material is zero-knowledge.

The biggest edge case is disaster recovery. If the enterprise cannot decrypt, it may still need recovery keys, escrow procedures, or break-glass access paths that are tightly governed and periodically tested. Another common failure mode is assuming “provider cannot see it” means “provider cannot be a dependency.” Availability, revocation, and audit export obligations still matter. The right benchmark is whether the enterprise can prove who had access, when, and why, even under incident pressure.

For broader context on governance priorities, see Top 10 NHI Issues and the NIST-aligned control expectations in NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• Why is single-provider AI agent governance not enough for enterprise security?
• What does a mature secrets governance program need to cover?
• Why do ServiceNow tickets and knowledge bases leak secrets so easily?
• Why does zero-knowledge design matter for enterprise credential governance?