The set of practices used to create, store, transmit, and rotate credentials such as API keys, tokens, and certificates. Poor secrets handling in generated code can create standing access, leak privileged credentials, and undermine both application security and broader identity governance.
Expanded Definition
Secrets handling is the operational discipline for creating, storing, distributing, rotating, and revoking credentials used by software and autonomous systems. In NHI environments, that includes API keys, tokens, certificates, signing keys, and short-lived credentials that a service or agent uses to authenticate and act. The concept is broader than vaulting alone: it also covers how secrets enter code, CI/CD systems, chat tools, ticketing systems, and runtime environments, and how quickly they are removed when no longer needed.
Definitions vary across vendors, but the practical distinction is clear. Good secrets handling reduces exposure while preserving machine-to-machine availability, whereas weak handling turns credentials into durable access paths. That is why NHI security guidance such as the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 treats secret lifecycle failures as a core identity risk, not just a configuration issue. NHI Management Group research shows the scale of the problem: in the 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity, 62% of secrets were duplicated and stored in multiple locations.
The most common misapplication is treating secrets handling as a one-time vault migration, which occurs when teams move credentials into a central tool but leave hard-coded copies, stale tokens, and broad access paths in place.
Examples and Use Cases
Implementing secrets handling rigorously often introduces operational friction, requiring organisations to weigh faster developer delivery against tighter control over credential creation and rotation.
- A CI/CD pipeline injects short-lived deployment tokens at build time instead of committing long-lived API keys into source control, reducing the blast radius if a build log is exposed.
- An AI agent or backend service retrieves certificates from a managed secret store at runtime and rotates them automatically, rather than reusing one shared credential across many workloads.
- Security teams investigate leaked credentials found in GitHub commits by revoking them, tracing usage, and removing duplicate copies in ticketing systems and chat exports, as discussed in the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge.
- Application owners use scanning and policy enforcement to block secrets from entering repositories, build artifacts, and container images, aligning with lifecycle controls described in the OWASP guidance.
- Platform teams separate production and non-production secrets so that one exposed token cannot unlock unrelated environments or shared services.
Why It Matters in NHI Security
Secrets handling is often the difference between a contained incident and identity sprawl. When a token is copied into a chat thread, stored in multiple places, or left active after a role change, the credential becomes a persistent NHI control failure rather than a simple leak. That is why poor handling can undermine vault strategy, least privilege, and offboarding at the same time. In the 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey, only 44% of organisations reported using a dedicated secrets management system, which helps explain why manual processes still dominate leak response.
For NHI governance, the issue is not just where a secret is stored but how many places can reproduce it, how long it remains valid, and whether access is tied to a specific workload, agent, or environment. Breaches linked to exposed credentials frequently begin as convenience choices in development, then surface later as operational compromise. Organisational posture improves when teams assume every secret will eventually leak and design for fast revocation, narrow scope, and traceable ownership. Organisations typically encounter the consequences only after a leaked credential is used in production, at which point secrets handling becomes 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 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 | Addresses improper secret storage, exposure, and lifecycle weaknesses in non-human identities. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-1 | Access control depends on limiting credential exposure and validating who or what can use a secret. |
| NIST AI RMF | AI risk management covers credential leakage, misuse, and downstream operational harm from secret exposure. |
Inventory secrets, eliminate hard-coded copies, and enforce rotation and revocation for every NHI credential.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 10, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
