Performing Service Account Credential Rotation

Overview

Service accounts are non-human identities used by applications, daemons, CI/CD pipelines, and automated processes to authenticate to systems and APIs. These accounts often have elevated privileges and their credentials (passwords, API keys, certificates, tokens) are frequently long-lived and shared across teams, making them prime targets for attackers. Credential rotation is the systematic process of replacing these secrets on a scheduled basis, propagating new credentials to all dependent systems, and verifying service continuity after rotation.

When to Use

• When conducting security assessments that involve performing service account credential rotation
• When following incident response procedures for related security events
• When performing scheduled security testing or auditing activities
• When validating security controls through hands-on testing

Prerequisites

• Inventory of all service accounts across AD, cloud, and applications
• Secrets management platform (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, or CyberArk)
• Service dependency mapping (which services use which credentials)