# What are orphaned credentials?

> Orphaned credentials are tokens, keys and links that keep working after their owner or purpose is gone. Where they hide and how to find them before others do.

URL: https://crunu.com/learn/orphaned-credentials
Language: en
Updated: 2026-10-30

Orphaned credentials are credentials that still work but no longer have an owner or a purpose: a token created by someone who has left, a key for a service that was retired, an invitation never accepted, a share link nobody remembers, an enrollment code for a machine that was never set up.

## How they come about

Credentials are created by people for tasks. People move on and tasks finish, but nothing ties the credential's life to either. OWASP puts this first in its Non-Human Identities Top 10 as "Improper Offboarding": the "inadequate deactivation or removal of non-human identities (NHIs) such as service accounts and access keys" once they are no longer needed ([OWASP NHI Top 10](https://owasp.github.io/www-project-non-human-identities-top-10/2025/top-10-2025)).

Typical sources:

- **Departures.** Tokens a person created for their scripts, CI variables they set, SSH keys they added to servers.
- **Experiments.** A key made for a proof of concept that went nowhere.
- **Replaced systems.** The old deploy pipeline's credentials, still valid after the move to a new one.
- **Unfinished flows.** Invitations and machine enrollment codes issued and never used.

## Why they matter

An orphaned credential has the worst profile a credential can have: it is valid, nobody watches it, and nobody would notice if it were used. No one reviews its permissions, no one gets alerted on odd usage, and no one thinks to replace it when something else leaks. Often it was also created with broad permissions because it was meant to be temporary.

## Finding them

Start from your systems, not from the people. A list of what a departing person "had" misses what they created on the side.

- Ask each provider for credentials and their last use: cloud consoles, Git hosts and payment providers usually show it.
- Treat "never used" and "not used for months" as candidates for removal.
- Tie each remaining credential to an owner that is a team or a service, not a person.
- Prefer credentials that expire. A forgotten credential with a short lifetime fixes itself.

## Common mistakes

- **Revoking only the person's account.** The tokens they created may belong to other accounts or to no account at all.
- **Keeping things "just in case".** If nobody can say what a credential is for, deactivate it first and delete it after a quiet period.
- **No owner field.** A note saying who created a key and why costs seconds and saves an afternoon later.

## How Crunu handles its own

Crunu's member removal wizard looks for exactly this inside Crunu. Its first step lists what the person could have carried away: service tokens they created and saw, machines not yet approved whose enrollment code they may have kept, and invitations and share links they created. You tick what to revoke, and it is revoked as part of the removal, together with the rotation of environment keys.

*Figure: Timeline of removing Tom Halvorsen, an example member of Kiteline, a fictional company. In Crunu: 1, the member is removed and the server stops serving them at once. 2, the service tokens, share links, invites and enrollment codes they could use are revoked. 3, the keys of their 6 environments are rotated in the admin’s browser and sealed to everyone who stays; the server stores only the new sealed keys. 4, an exposure report shows which versions of which environments they received, when and from which address. By hand: 5, 34 values are reissued at their providers, because what has been seen can’t be revoked.*

Crunu's own credentials also tend to age out: invitations last up to 7 days, enrollment codes 15 minutes by default, and share links, service tokens and machines can have expiry, usage limits or leases. Credentials at your providers are a different matter. Crunu can't list or revoke tokens at GitHub, AWS or Stripe; the **reissue checklist** names values to replace, and the rest of the inventory is yours. [What to rotate when a developer leaves](https://crunu.com/guides/developer-offboarding-secret-rotation) has a table of the credentials people most often forget.

## Sources

- [OWASP Non-Human Identities Top 10 (2025)](https://owasp.github.io/www-project-non-human-identities-top-10/2025/top-10-2025), checked October 30, 2026.