Credential Security

Overview

Credential security covers controls that prevent passwords, keys, tokens, certificates, and recovery factors from being guessed, copied, stolen, replayed, or misused. It begins with trustworthy enrollment and secure credential generation.

Protection methods include strong password hashing, hardware-backed keys, secret managers, encrypted transport, short lifetimes, least privilege, phishing-resistant factors, device binding, and safe session handling. Recovery and support processes require equal protection because attackers often target them.

Organizations should avoid shared credentials, monitor abnormal use, inventory owners and dependencies, and revoke promptly after compromise or role change. Credential strength cannot compensate for an application that accepts the credential for excessive or unrelated authority. Controls must cover both human and machine identities.

An auditable record of Credential Security should link enrollment, authentication, authorization, elevation, access, rotation, revocation, and account-recovery events to the governing policy or model version, source evidence, decision, approver, exception, action, and final outcome.

Credential Security is a security mechanism or control discipline that protects identity and access evidence throughout creation, storage, transmission, use, recovery, rotation, revocation, and retirement and recovery. Credential security is a lifecycle discipline, and weak recovery, storage, scope, or revocation can defeat strong authentication technology.

For Credential Security, the trust decision should establish protection of identity and access evidence throughout creation, storage, transmission, use, recovery, rotation, revocation, and retirement and recovery and bind the result to the requested action and protected resource. Teams should test issuance, storage, validation, expiry, revocation, recovery, and privileged override for identity and access evidence throughout creation, storage, and transmission, rather than checking only a successful request. Logs concerning the Credential Security context and identity and access evidence throughout creation, storage, and transmission should support investigation without exposing reusable secrets or unnecessary personal data.