Credential management for AI agents

This blog has been adapted from an excerpted section of 1Password’s ebook: Credential sprawl: How AI increases the risks. To read the complete ebook and learn more about the evolving challenges of credential sprawl, click here. The proliferation of credentials outside centralized visibility and control is known as “credential sprawl,” and attackers are eager to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, credential management is a broad problem that only grows in complexity as organizations add new tools, employees, and partners. Today’s companies have to manage an ever-growing number of credentials that go well beyond traditional passwords, such as developer secrets, passkeys, shared logins, API keys, SSH keys, service accounts, and SSO access tokens. Each of these, if exposed in an attack or breach, can have severe consequences, and developer secrets pose particular, systemic risk. Addressing credential sprawl has become especially urgent due to the rise of AI-based tools and agents. AI agents are a primary driver of credential sprawl because they create, use, and replicate credentials at machine scale. They have unique access needs and can behave both autonomously and unpredictably. Companies that want to integrate AI-based tools must carefully consider how to mitigate these risks to avoid an exponential rise in unmanaged and vulnerable credentials. How do AI agents increase credential risk? AI agents increase credential security risks through their reliance on non-human identities like API keys and service accounts, which are frequently overprivileged, long-lived, and poorly audited. Agents create and use these credentials at machine scale, beyond centralized oversight, leading to rapidly expanding credential sprawl with limited oversight for security teams. And while AI tools and agents pose new and distinct risks, they’re also expanding on credential problems that have existed for years, stemming from SaaS sprawl, shadow IT, and unsafe developer practices. Traditional security tools are falling behind As security analyst Francis Odum shared in his enterprise identity security report, “As organizations increasingly adopted SaaS applications, the need for enterprise-grade password management became more pronounced. Employees frequently relied on personal credentials for work accounts, increasing the risk of credential reuse and security incidents. While Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) became standard controls, they often failed to cover the full range of enterprise applications, leaving visibility gaps…” In its research report, 1Password found that the average company has a third of its apps outside SSO’s protection. Our report also noted that, “One major indicator of how SSO is falling short is the amount of access that comes from employees whom IT believed to have been successfully offboarded. Over one-third (38%) of employees have successfully accessed a prior employer’s account, data, or applications after leaving the company.” Now, AI is accelerating SaaS sprawl even further beyond what SSO was built for. 1Password’s research also found that 1 in 4 employees has used AI applications that weren’t approved by their company, and over a third of employees admit to having knowingly disregarded their company’s AI policies. Employees are experimenting with AI coding tools, browser extensions, writing assistants, data analysis tools, and agent platforms, often before IT has evaluated or approved them. Many of these tools don’t integrate cleanly with enterprise SSO, and even when they do, adoption frequently begins outside official onboarding processes. Shadow AI poses serious risks, as even innocuous apps can contain security flaws that expose company data and credentials. Each unmanaged app and AI tool represents at least one unmanaged credential that an organization can’t secure. And as the number of unmanaged credentials grows, so does the likelihood that one is exposed, overprivileged, forgotten, or used to create a direct path to unauthorized access. The result is an ever-expanding layer of applications and credentials that exist outside centralized governance. For a more in-depth look at SSO's limitations, read our ebook, Why SSO is not enough for identity security. Unmanaged AI agent access AI agents represent an entirely new class of identities; they require varying levels of access, and they operate in ways that are frequently invisible to security tools. As The Hacker News put it, “AI agents don't operate in isolation. To function, they need access to data, systems, and resources. This highly privileged, often overlooked access happens through non-human identities: API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens, and other machine credentials.” All NHIs pose credential risk – over-privileged service accounts, for example, have been putting CI/CD pipelines at risk for years – but the way that AI agents use them has increased their sprawl drastically. Figures vary, but in 2025,

Excerpt shown under the publisher's RSS terms · 200 words · full text and figures are on the publisher's site