How to Stop Expired Secrets from Disrupting Your Operations – Source: securityboulevard.com

The Real-World Impact: Dollars and Disruption

The financial implications of credential-related outages are staggering. According to recent 2024 data, the average cost of a single minute of downtime has increased to around $9,000. Certificate expiry, a common form of credential expiration, is one of the leading causes of website and service downtime.

While TLS/SSL certificate expiration often gets the most attention due to its visible impact on websites, many types of machine credentials have built-in expiration. API keys silently time out in backend services, OAuth tokens reach their limits, IAM role sessions terminate, Kubernetes service account tokens expire, and database connection credentials become invalid. Unlike certificates, these failures often lack clear error messages or visibility –making them harder to diagnose and remediate before they cause outages.

Even tech giants struggle with credential management:

• SpaceX’s Starlink: An expired security certificate for a ground station caused a network-wide service disruption, as publicly acknowledged by Elon Musk in early 2023. The incident demonstrated how a single credential expiration at a critical infrastructure component could cascade into widespread connectivity issues for thousands of users across multiple geographic regions, affecting both consumer internet access and enterprise customers who rely on Starlink for mission-critical operations.
• Robinhood Trading Platform: An authentication system failure between internal microservices led to a major outage during a high-volume trading day in March 2020, preventing customers from executing trades as markets moved dramatically. The company’s post-mortem revealed how critical machine-to-machine authentication is for maintaining financial service availability.

How Expired Credentials Cause Disruption

The primary consequence of an expired credential is a failed authentication attempt. At first glance, this might seem like a simple fix – just replace the credential and restart the service. But in reality, identifying and resolving an expired credential issue is rarely straightforward.

Consider a cloud-native application that relies on multiple APIs, internal microservices, and external integrations. If an API key or OAuth token used by a backend service expires, the application might return unexpected errors, time out, or degrade in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Debugging the issue often requires tracing logs, identifying failing authentication requests, and determining whether the failure stems from a recent code change, misconfiguration, a permissions issue, or an expired credential.

Now multiply this across a DevOps environment where automated workflows, Kubernetes clusters, and CI/CD pipelines rely on hundreds or thousands of non-human identities. When an expired credential halts a deployment or prevents an infrastructure component from authenticating with another service, the impact ripples across teams.

Engineers may, for example, investigate whether the failure stems from recent code changes, Ops teams check for misconfigurations, and security teams dig into access policies – often working in parallel, unsure where the issue originated. What starts as a single expired credential can quickly escalate into an all-hands-on-deck scenario.

The Operational Burden of Credential Management

Many organizations still manage non-human credentials using ad-hoc methods – storing secrets in configuration files, tracking expiration dates in spreadsheets, or relying on developers to manually rotate keys when they remember. These approaches don’t scale.

The lifecycle of a credential involves ensuring that credentials are issued securely, rotated periodically, and revoked when no longer needed. However, manual processes introduce friction:

• Developers are forced to pause work to replace credentials
• Security teams struggle to enforce policies across distributed environments
• Incident response teams waste time diagnosing expired credentials instead of focusing on real security threats

When a credential expires unexpectedly, the remediation process often involves multiple teams: the DevOps team that owns the affected service, the security team that governs authentication policies, and the platform engineering team that manages underlying infrastructure. Without automation, this quickly becomes a repetitive and high-risk process, especially because many credentials need to be rotated simultaneously on both the server and client workloads.

This synchronization challenge is what makes expired credentials so disruptive. To rotate a credential without causing downtime, teams must first identify everywhere it’s being used – across APIs, services, and infrastructure components. But in many organizations, this information isn’t centralized. Credentials are scattered across config files, embedded in applications, or stored in multiple vaults, making it difficult to track dependencies and coordinate updates.

Automating Credential Expiry Management: A Three-Step Approach

Step 1: Establish Visibility and Inventory

Before you can manage credentials, you need to know what exists in your environment. Implement a centralized inventory system that tracks:

• All types of non-human credentials (certificates, API keys, service accounts).
• Ownership and associated services.
• Creation and expiration dates.
• Criticality level (impact if expired).

Step 2: Implement Proactive Monitoring

Set up automated monitoring with appropriate alert thresholds:

• Early warnings at 30, 14, and 7 days before expiration.
• Escalating notification paths for sensitive credentials.
• Integration with incident management systems.
• Dashboard visibility for security and operations teams.

Step 3: Automate Secure Access Management

The best way to prevent credential expiration from disrupting production is to automate its management. Instead of relying on manual tracking and reactive fixes, organizations should implement systems that detect, rotate, and replace credentials before they cause failures. 

Modern identity and secrets management solutions offer built-in automation to help with:

• Automated expiration tracking: Systems like AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, and Kubernetes Secrets provide expiration awareness and rotation capabilities, ensuring credentials don’t go unnoticed until they fail.

• Short-lived, dynamically generated credentials: Instead of relying on long-lived API keys or hardcoded secrets, organizations can implement just-in-time (JIT) access models that issue temporary tokens with automatic expiration. This approach is particularly useful in multi-cloud environments, where workload identity federation can replace static credentials across cloud providers.

• Policy enforcement: Going beyond a dashboard that says you may have a problem, security teams can enforce expiration policies at scale, ensuring that credentials are renewed before they become a problem.

By shifting from reactive credential replacement to proactive automation, teams can eliminate the operational burden of expired credentials and reduce downtime, while also strengthening security by minimizing long-lived secrets.

Getting Started: Quick Wins for Immediate Impact

Even if you’re not ready for full automation, you can take steps today to reduce credential-related risks:

1) Conduct a credential audit: Identify and document all non-human credentials in your environment.

2) Centralize storage: Move credentials to a secure, central secrets management platform.

3) Implement tagging: Require metadata for all credentials, including owner, purpose, and expiration date.

4) Create emergency runbooks: Document clear procedures for handling credential expiration incidents.

5) Measure and report: Track incidents caused by expired credentials to build the business case for further investment.

Expired non-human credentials are an often-overlooked source of outages and security risk. While individual failures may seem minor, the cumulative impact of manually managing thousands of credentials across cloud-native environments is unsustainable – and as we’ve seen, the financial consequences can be severe.

To keep systems running smoothly and securely, organizations must rethink how they handle authentication for non-human identities. By embracing automation, reducing reliance on static credentials, and enforcing expiration policies at scale, DevOps and security teams can work together to prevent disruptions before they happen. The initial investment in proper credential management will pay dividends in reduced downtime, enhanced security, and freed engineering resources.

For information on how Aembit can help, visit https://aembit.io.