Infrastructure secrets are credentials used by systems to authenticate with other systems. They include database passwords, API keys, TLS certificates, service account tokens, and SSH keys. The main goals are centralization, auditability, and rotation, because these values are often static and are frequently copied into environments where they become hard to govern.
Expanded Definition
Infrastructure secrets are not just stored values, but operational trust anchors that let one system prove itself to another. In NHI and agentic environments, they typically include database passwords, API keys, TLS private keys, service account tokens, and SSH credentials. The critical distinction is that infrastructure secrets are used by machines at execution time, which means they must be governed for lifecycle, exposure paths, and rotation pressure, not only for initial issuance.
Definitions vary across vendors on whether ephemeral session tokens and certificate material should be treated as secrets, but no single standard governs this yet. NHI Management Group treats the category broadly because the security outcome is the same: if a workload can read or reuse the value, it can impersonate the identity behind it. That is why guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is useful for framing secrets as an identity control surface rather than a simple configuration artifact.
The most common misapplication is treating infrastructure secrets as application configuration, which occurs when they are copied into environment files, images, tickets, or chat tools without centralized governance.
Examples and Use Cases
Implementing infrastructure secrets rigorously often introduces operational friction, requiring organisations to weigh deployment speed against tighter access control, rotation cadence, and break-glass recovery.
- A CI/CD pipeline fetches a short-lived deployment token from a central secrets service instead of embedding a long-lived key in the build job.
- A database password is rotated automatically after a service account is provisioned, reducing the value of any leaked credential.
- A Kubernetes workload receives a service account token at runtime and renews it through policy, rather than storing a static token in the container image.
- An SSH private key used for administrative access is vaulted, audited, and time-bound so that access can be traced and revoked quickly.
- A team reviews a breach pattern described in the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge and replaces scattered credentials with centrally managed issuance, following the same identity-bound approach described in NIST SP 800-207 Zero Trust Architecture.
In practice, the hardest use cases are not the obvious passwords but the hidden credentials embedded in pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and collaboration workflows. GitGuardian’s State of Secrets Sprawl 2025 shows how easily those values spread once they leave a controlled vault.
Why It Matters in NHI Security
Infrastructure secrets are a direct attack path into both systems and the identities those systems represent. When they are static, over-shared, or stored in inconsistent locations, they turn NHI governance into a guessing game because no one can confidently answer where a credential exists, who can read it, or whether it is still valid. The 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey found that 67% of organisations still rely heavily on static credentials despite the risks they pose to agentic AI deployments, and 70% grant AI systems more access than they would give a human employee performing the exact same job. That gap matters because secrets are often the mechanism that makes over-privileged machine access possible.
This is also why the issue belongs in governance conversations aligned with the NIST Security and Privacy Controls and SPIFFE identity federation patterns, where identity should be verifiable and short-lived where possible. The right control model treats secrets as issuable, auditable, and revocable identity artifacts, not reusable convenience values.
Organisations typically encounter the true cost of infrastructure secrets only after a repository leak, pipeline compromise, or cloud takeover, at which point rotation, scoping, and provenance become operationally unavoidable to address.
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 CSF 2.0, NIST SP 800-63 and NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 | Covers improper secret handling and exposure of machine identities. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-1 | Identity proofing and credential lifecycle controls apply to machine credentials. |
| NIST SP 800-63 | AAL2 | Assurance concepts help compare machine credential strength and replay resistance. |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | None | Zero trust requires each workload credential to be continuously validated. |
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | AGENT-03 | Agentic systems often consume static secrets that expand their authority. |
Inventory secrets, remove hardcoded values, and enforce vault-backed rotation for every workload credential.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on August 24, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
