Shadow Vaults & Secrets Managers: An Identity Blind Spot Hiding in Plain Sight

Vaults and secrets managers are designed to protect sensitive credentials, but when misconfigured or unmanaged, they can become a source of risk rather than protection. When vaults are created and operate outside identity governance and security visibility, they become shadow vaults: unmanaged secret stores that quietly undermine access controls, create blindspots, and significantly increase the attack risk surface.

Shadow vaults are not just a tooling problem. They are an identity & security  problem.

What Are Shadow Vaults?

Shadow vaults are vaults or secret managers that exist outside centralized identity, access, and security oversight. These vaults rarely come from malicious intent. Instead, they emerge when identity and security governance fails to keep pace with the scale and automation needed by DevOps teams. They may be properly deployed technologies, but are not connected to enterprise IAM, security monitoring, or policy enforcement.

These vaults often:

• Operate with default settings, authenticating identities without strong assurance

• Grant long-lived or overly broad access

• Lack centralized logging or behavioral monitoring

• Break the traceability between who accessed a secret and how it was used

From a security perspective, a shadow vault is any vault you cannot fully observe, govern, or correlate to identity or risk behavior, resulting in:

1. Identity and Secrets Access Bypasses Governance

Applications, services, non-human identities (NHI), and Agentic AI are granted direct vault access using static credentials or loosely scoped roles, without approval workflows or continuous validation.

2. Decentralized Authentication Models

Teams authenticate vaults using local IAM roles, embedded tokens, or service principals that are never enrolled into centralized identity governance, MFA policies, or risk scoring.

3. Non-Human Identity Sprawl

As machine identities outnumber humans, secrets are increasingly accessed by:

• Service accounts

• Bots

• CI/CD identities

• Agentic AI

  
  

Without security controls, these identities persist long after their purpose ends, quietly retaining vault access.

4. Lack of Identity-to-Secret Correlation

Even “approved” vaults become shadow vaults when security teams can’t answer:

Which identity accessed which secret, from where, and what happened next?

Without this linkage, vault access becomes opaque.

The Security Risks of Shadow Vaults

Excessive and Invisible Privilege

Shadow vaults often rely on static credentials or broad roles, violating identity policies and enabling potential misuse.

Identity Blind Spots

When vault activity isn’t correlated with identity telemetry, security teams lose visibility into anomalous behavior, especially from non-human or AI-driven access.

Credential Abuse and Lateral Movement

Compromised secrets retrieved from shadow vaults can be reused across environments, increasing risk and enabling attackers to pivot undetected.

Audit and Compliance Failures

If you can’t prove who accessed a secret and why, audits fail and breaches become harder to contain or attribute.

AI-Driven Amplification of Risk

Agentic AI can request, store, and reuse secrets at machine speed. Without guardrails, a single misconfigured identity can cascade into widespread exposure.

How Organizations Can Detect Shadow Vaults

Detection requires shifting from vault-centric security to identity-centric observability:

1. Discover All Accessible Vaults

Identify every vault and secret store that identities, AI, NHI, and human can authenticate to, regardless of ownership or intent.

2. Correlate Identity → Vault → Secret Usage

Security teams must be able to trace:identity authentication → vault access → secret retrieval → downstream use

Anything outside this chain is a shadow vault.

3. Monitor Identity Access and Behavior, Not Just Policies

Look for anomalies such as:

• Unusual secret access patterns

• New machine identities accessing sensitive secrets

• Secrets retrieved but never rotated or expired

• Access from unexpected locations or runtimes

  
  

4. Govern Non-Human and AI Identities

Apply the same rigor to NHI and agentic AI as human users:

• Lifecycle management

• Continuous verification

• Least privilege enforcement

• Behavioral monitoring

  
  

5. Enforce Centralized Identity Policies

Vaults should inherit enterprise identity and security controls, including MFA, conditional access, risk scoring, etc. 

Conclusion

Shadow vaults aren’t just hidden infrastructure, they’re identity blind spots that create major security risks.

In a world of agentic AI and non-human identities, securing secrets requires more than deploying vaults. It requires full identity observability and protection, continuous governance and the ability to see how identities and secrets interact in real time.

If you can’t see the identity that is using the secret, your  vault is in the shadows and your security is at major risk.