Find credentials that appear inactive, verify whether they are truly safe to retire, then disable or revoke them before deleting them. A “last used” date—or no activity recorded—is a lead for investigation, not proof that a key or token is no longer needed.
What counts as an unused API key or OAuth token?
“Unused” depends on the credential and the evidence available. An API key may authenticate a workload directly; OAuth involves several distinct items, including a client ID, client secret, access token, refresh token, and a user’s grant of permission. A dashboard that reports an application as inactive may not show whether every credential or token associated with it is inactive.
Activity data also has limits. Some systems expose per-key authentication events, while others show only app-level activity, coarse dates, or no last-used date. Scheduled, seasonal, reporting, and disaster-recovery workloads may be quiet for long periods. Treat inactivity as a reason to investigate, not as a universal definition of unused.
Build an inventory before changing credentials
Set the scope first: identify the cloud accounts, projects, tenants, organizations, repositories, and SaaS services being reviewed. No single console necessarily inventories every credential class. Include human IAM keys, service-account keys, machine identities, application registrations and secrets, SaaS-issued API keys, OAuth grants, and access or refresh tokens where they are exposed.
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Record the credential identifier, not its secret value. Keep the inventory in a controlled location and do not paste secrets into an audit sheet.
- Provider, account or tenant, and credential type
- Owner, calling application or workload, and environment
- Permissions or OAuth scopes
- Creation and expiry dates
- Last-used signal, its source, and any known data limitations
- Proposed action and the person or team responsible for confirming it
Google for Developers advises securely storing OAuth client credentials and user tokens, and revoking and deleting tokens when they are no longer needed. Apply equivalent care to the inventory itself: it should identify credentials without becoming another place where secrets are exposed.
Find activity and assess the quality of the signal
Use provider-native inventories, usage metrics, and audit logs rather than relying on creation date or a single dashboard label. Check that the data source covers the relevant account, app, credential type, and period. Preserve uncertainty in the record instead of turning “not available” into “unused.”
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| Provider feature | What it can tell you | Important qualification |
|---|---|---|
| AWS credential reports, IAM Access Analyzer, CloudWatch alarms, and GuardDuty | AWS recommends these as part of credential and access review and monitoring. | Confirm which identities and activity sources are covered in your environment; a report is not proof that every workload dependency is represented. |
| Google Cloud service-account insights and Key Authentication Events metric | Service-account insights identify accounts unused in the past 90 days; the metric can show when and how often a key authenticated. | The 90-day period is this Google Cloud insight’s window, not a universal inactivity threshold. |
| Microsoft App Governance | Provides last-used and credential-unused information, with filtering and export options. | Some records show only “Over 30 days ago” or “Not available,” so the date may be too coarse or absent to establish inactivity. |
For low-frequency integrations, compare the observed period with the workload’s business cycle. Consider seasonal jobs, scheduled reports, recovery procedures, and infrequent administrative tasks. Where possible, validate non-production or recovery flows rather than waiting for a critical event to discover a dependency. The appropriate observation period is a local risk decision; the provider windows above are not interchangeable.
Confirm the owner and decide what to do
Classify each record as active, apparently inactive, unknown, expiring, or suspected compromised. Send apparently inactive and unknown items to the accountable owner or application team. Confirm what calls the credential, which environment uses it, whether a replacement is deployed, and whether all consumers have migrated.
Review permissions and scopes during triage. A credential can be active yet overprivileged, making a permission reduction more appropriate than removal. AWS recommends regular credential and permission audits, including removing access that is no longer required.
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If a credential is suspected compromised, do not wait for a routine inactivity review or observation period. Use the issuer’s incident procedure to revoke it promptly and review audit activity. For Google Cloud, Google’s incident guidance says password reset, user suspension, or sign-in-cookie reset alone may not invalidate access tokens an attacker already controls. Follow the relevant issuer’s process for other platforms.
Disable or revoke first; delete after validation
For routine cleanup, plan the change with the owner, especially for production or critical integrations. Prefer an action that can be reversed where the provider supports one. Monitor authentication failures, application health, audit events, and unexpected use after the change. If no legitimate dependency appears during the agreed recovery period, delete the credential or client and update the inventory.
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Service-account keys
Google Cloud advises disabling a service-account key when it is no longer needed, then deleting it once you are certain it is no longer needed. Disabling first gives the team a chance to detect an overlooked dependency before permanent removal.
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OAuth tokens, grants, and clients
Distinguish a user’s access or refresh token from an OAuth client’s ID and secret. Revoking a token can affect associated tokens, and deleting an OAuth client can cause API calls using associated access or refresh tokens to fail. Check the issuer’s semantics before a bulk action. AWS Sign-In documents token introspection, refresh-token revocation, and CloudTrail events for OAuth lifecycle activity; Google documents a revocation endpoint for compromised Google Cloud credentials.
OAuth client-secret rotation
When rotating a Google OAuth client secret, Google’s documented staged approach is to add a new secret, migrate consumers while the old one remains usable, and then disable the old secret. Use this pattern where the issuer supports it, and verify every consumer has moved before retiring the old secret.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Use provider thresholds only for the products they describe
Vendor thresholds are operational guidance, not a universal rule for declaring credentials dead.
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- AWS long-term IAM access keys: AWS’s 2025 Well-Architected Framework recommends a maximum of 90 days between rotations when temporary credentials cannot be used. This is AWS-specific guidance for that case, not a rule for every provider or OAuth token.
- Google Cloud service-account insights: the insight identifies accounts unused in the past 90 days. That is the feature’s inactivity window, not proof that an account is safe to delete.
- Google OAuth clients: Google says an OAuth client inactive for six months can be automatically deleted and sends notification 30 days before scheduled deletion. Google recommends proactively deleting unneeded clients rather than waiting for automatic deletion.
Prevent unused credentials from accumulating again
- Prefer temporary credentials or managed workload identity over long-lived keys when the provider and workload support them.
- Assign an accountable owner and set an expiry or review date when creating a credential.
- Store secrets in an appropriate secret manager, restrict permissions and scopes, and monitor for unexpected use.
- Schedule recurring inventory reviews across cloud, SaaS, and repository environments rather than assuming one dashboard covers all credentials.
- For long-term AWS IAM keys that cannot be replaced with temporary credentials, follow AWS’s maximum 90-day rotation guidance; use each other provider’s current guidance for its credential types.
How to evaluate a credential-inventory tool
Whether using native consoles or a third-party tool, check what the data actually represents before acting on it. A useful inventory should make its coverage and blind spots visible, not merely label items inactive.
- Which providers, accounts, SaaS services, and repositories are covered?
- Which credential types are inventoried, and does the tool show individual credentials or only parent applications?
- How precise are timestamps, what is the lookback period, and where are there data gaps?
- Can activity be associated with a specific key, workload, owner, scope, and environment?
- Can records be exported and correlated with audit logs?
- Does the tool support reversible disable or revoke actions and record the resulting event?
- Does it support permission review, alerts, and migration to temporary identity?
- What licensing or deployment work is required, and are the necessary data sources enabled in the target tenant?
Microsoft’s documented coarse or unavailable activity dates illustrate why signal quality matters: a label without a reliable timestamp should prompt investigation, not automatic deletion.
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