Definition
Credential rotation is a security procedure in which authentication credentials, such as passwords, API keys, or certificates, are regularly changed or replaced to minimize the risk of unauthorized access.
How it works
Credentials can be systematically changed at predetermined intervals or based on specific events. Credentials such as user passwords may be rotated manually, but it is increasingly common to use an automated system to manage rotation of enterprise passwords, certificates and keys.
Considerations
- Rotation of credentials must be managed carefully to avoid inadvertent service interruption
- Management servers with enterprise policies for account management provide the ability to change or reset passwords for accounts. Some organizations rotate credentials periodically to limit the risk of stolen credentials.
- When responding to an incident, severity of compromise should be considered to determine what credentials to what accounts should be regenerated
- If proactively rotating credentials periodically, several factors should be considered to determine the frequency. Also introduces some risk including promoting the creation of weak passwords and poor storage practices for employees and presents challenges in proper tracking.
Implementation perspective
Credential Rotation should be treated as a technical defensive capability rather than a product checkbox. In practice, teams should define the protected scope, the conditions under which the technique acts, and the observable evidence that demonstrates the intended behavior. For this technique, likely engineering context includes Certificate, Credential, Password.
Use the technique to increase the effort, prerequisites, or constraints an adversary must overcome before exploitation or misuse succeeds.
Questions to ask
- Which component, configuration, credential, interface, or behavior is being hardened?
- What secure baseline or policy defines the intended state?
- How are exceptions approved, time-limited, and reviewed?
- How is the hardened state verified after deployment and significant change?
Evidence and validation
- Approved hardening standards and configuration baselines
- Automated configuration or integrity assessment results
- Exception records with owners, rationale, and expiration dates
- Test results demonstrating that the intended restriction is enforced
Common failure patterns
- A secure setting is documented but not enforced consistently across the environment.
- Hardening breaks required functions and is permanently weakened through undocumented exceptions.
- Teams measure deployment of a product rather than verification of the hardened condition.
This implementation perspective is original Bare Metal Cyber educational content. It does not replace the official D3FEND definition or establish that a specific product implements the technique.
Technique hierarchy
Top-level family
Parent techniques
Direct child techniques
Artifacts and ontology entities
These relationships describe how D3FEND connects a defensive technique to artifacts or other ontology entities. They describe graph semantics, not a product certification.
Explicit technique relationships
Show inferred artifact relationship paths (4)
Offensive-technique relationships
These relationships are generated from D3FEND graph paths and are explicitly experimental. They should be treated as hypotheses for defensive analysis—not as proof that the technique prevents, detects, or removes an offensive behavior.
ATT&CK Enterprise (21)
ATT&CK for ICS (3)
Authoritative sources
- Open this technique on the official D3FEND website ↗
- Open the official ontology resources ↗
- Eviction Guidance for Networks Affected by the SolarWinds and Active Directory/M365 Compromise ↗CISA · InternetArticleReference
- Password and Key Rotation ↗SSH · InternetArticleReference
- Related source ↗
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