Integration Credential

Overview

Integration Credential is a secret, certificate, token, key, or other identity material used by one system to authenticate and sometimes authorize an integration with another system. Monitoring for Integration Credential should track failed use, unusual scope or audience, expiry, rotation status, and attempts involving revoked credentials.

Key risks include credential leakage, excessive privilege, orphaned integrations, shared credentials, absent rotation, production secrets used in test environments, and unclear responsibility during compromise. It is a general category that can include client secrets, API keys, certificates, signing keys, and access tokens, each with different lifecycle and replay properties.

A production implementation should assign an owner, restrict scope, store it in a managed secret system, separate environments, rotate and revoke it, monitor use, and prevent exposure in code, logs, tickets, or client-side applications. For Integration Credential, secrets and tokens should remain outside browser bundles, URLs, ordinary logs, and unprotected configuration.

Useful measures include credential age, unused credentials, rotation success, failed authentications, anomalous source use, privileges per credential, and secrets detected outside approved storage. Integration Credential is closely connected to Client Secret, Certificate Authentication, and Authorization Header.

A compromise response for Integration Credential should support rapid revocation, replacement, affected-client identification, and review of prior use. The Integration Credential boundary should identify the principal, credential or key, permitted audience, scope, lifetime, and revocation path.

Changes to Integration Credential should preserve overlap or recovery where required while preventing old credentials from remaining active indefinitely. Evidence for Integration Credential should record the credential or certificate identifier and decision result without retaining the secret itself.