Privileged Access Management with Passwordless

PAM 101: what it is and what it covers

Privileged access management is the discipline and tooling that govern how highly empowered identities, human administrators, third-party operators, service principals, machine and workload identities, obtain, use, and relinquish elevated rights. In practical terms, PAM defines policies and controls for issuing privileged sessions, escrow and rotation of secrets, step-up authentication, approvals, monitoring, recording, and forensics. Mature programs extend these controls across clouds and data centers, integrate with identity providers and device-trust systems, and apply least privilege dynamically rather than as a one-time role mapping. The objectives are straightforward: stop credential theft, block lateral movement, contain ransomware blast radius, and make administrative activity attributable and auditable. NIST, CISA, and leading reference architectures increasingly frame PAM as a core pillar of Zero Trust, privileged access is never implicit; it is explicitly evaluated per request and continuously verified.

Privileged identities: humans, service accounts, machines, API keys

Privileged identities are broader than “domain admins.” Humans include infrastructure and cloud administrators, DBAs, SOC responders, SREs with emergency controls, and third-party maintainers. Non-human identities include service accounts that run jobs or daemons, workload identities (containers, serverless), automation robots in CI/CD, and API keys embedded in integration glue. These identities often operate outside user UIs and can be over-provisioned, long-lived, and shared across teams, which makes them attractive targets for attackers and painful for auditors. NIST SP 800-53’s AC-2 family emphasizes formal account management, limits on shared accounts, explicit usage conditions, and dynamic activation/deactivation, controls that, if ignored, tend to accumulate “standing privilege” and shadow access that later become initial footholds.

Risk drivers: credential theft, lateral movement, ransomware

The 2025 Verizon DBIR again spotlights credentials as the most common initial access vector, with credential abuse leading non-error, non-misuse breaches and ransomware present in 44% of breaches analyzed. The report also correlates infostealer logs and marketplace dumps with ransomware disclosures, reinforcing how quickly stolen secrets become operationalized. For defenders, that means every long-lived password, token, or static key is a hazard; every privileged session is a potential lateral-movement springboard. PAM’s mandate is to shrink these windows and require stronger proof of identity bound to verified devices and trustworthy execution paths.

Why go passwordless for PAM

Passwordless matters most where the stakes are highest. Administrative portals, hypervisor consoles, cloud control planes, break-glass entry points, and remote shells should be off-limits to “shared secret” logins. Phishing remains the dominant human-layer threat, and phishing-resistant multi-factor methods, WebAuthn/FIDO2 or PKI-backed smart cards (PIV/CAC), eliminate reusable codes and tie credentials to the origin being accessed. This prevents credential replay on look-alike sites and neutralizes push fatigue and SIM-swap avenues that plague legacy MFA. OMB’s federal Zero Trust strategy explicitly requires agencies to make phishing-resistant options available; CISA’s implementation guidance distills the same two controls: FIDO-based and PKI-based authenticators. For PAM, that translates into administrator sign-in flows that never rely on passwords or OTPs, especially for high-impact roles.

Attack paths via vaulted/shared passwords

Traditional PAM vaults reduce sprawl but don’t eliminate password risk. If humans can check out a shared admin credential, it can be phished, shoulder-surfaced, keylogged, or reused elsewhere. Attackers also abuse pass-the-hash and token replay techniques, which bypass knowledge of the secret entirely. NIST 800-53 cautions against shared/group accounts; MITRE ATT&CK documents credential-reuse techniques in depth. A passwordless-first design removes this entire class of attack by refusing to issue passwords to people at all: use brokered, ephemeral credentials for machines and origin-bound authenticators for humans.

Phishing-resistant MFA for administrators

CISA’s guidance is unambiguous: use phishing-resistant MFA for high-value targets. WebAuthn binds a private key in a secure authenticator to a specific relying-party origin; the browser will not present that key to a fraudulent site. PKI smart cards achieve similar guarantees through certificate-based mutual TLS or signed assertions. Both enforce user presence/verification (biometric or PIN), pair possession with something the user is, and prevent relay attacks that target legacy OTP or push prompts. For PAM, require phishing-resistant factors for any role activation or elevation events, not just initial SSO.

Ephemeral credentials & just-in-time elevation

Standing privilege is attacker oxygen. PAM should issue rights just-in-time (JIT) for narrow time windows and revoke them automatically. In cloud and SaaS, Microsoft Entra PIM exemplifies time- and approval-based activation of privileged roles to curb excessive access. For non-human use, shift from static, long-lived credentials to ephemeral, dynamically minted secrets: short-duration SSH certificates; database usernames/passwords generated on demand; cloud role credentials issued via federation instead of stored keys. If a token leaks, it expires quickly; if a session goes rogue, revocation is immediate and attributable.

Zero Trust principles for PAM (NIST SP 800-207)

Zero Trust places policy decision points (PDPs) and policy enforcement points (PEPs) in the path of every access request, fed by signals about identity, device, workload, and context. In PAM, that means privilege elevation and session brokering are not “one-and-done”; they are conditional and continuously evaluated. NIST SP 800-207 and the NCCoE ZTA practice guide provide the blueprint: no implicit trust from network location, explicit authorization per resource, and continuous monitoring. Privileged sessions should be scored and re-authenticated on risk spikes, not allowed to drift indefinitely.

Continuous verification & least privilege

Least privilege is a moving target; the right permission at 14:03 may be wrong at 14:15. Continuous verification uses device posture, geovelocity, workload integrity, and anomaly signals to decide if a privileged session may continue, be constrained, or must be re-authenticated. CISA’s Zero Trust Maturity Model v2.0 describes this as a progression from basic authentication gates to adaptive, risk-informed enforcement. For PAM, translate that into time-boxed elevations with mandatory step-up when the action or context crosses a risk threshold.

Policy decision/enforcement points for privileged sessions

Model privileged flows with an explicit PDP (policy engine) and PEP (broker/connector) in front of consoles and protocols. The PEP terminates admin connections, injects credentials, records sessions, enforces command controls, and can terminate on policy violations. The PDP evaluates identity strength, device health, user behavior, resource sensitivity, and ticket linkage before allowing or altering a session. This is the Zero Trust pattern; it applies whether you are brokering RDP/SSH or approving a cloud role activation.

Segmented admin workstations and strong device posture

Administrator activity should originate only from hardened, segmented Privileged Access Workstations (PAWs) or their modern equivalents, not from daily-use endpoints exposed to email and the open web. Microsoft’s PAW guidance details why this clean-source principle matters and how to implement it; the UK NCSC provides complementary principles for secure PAWs. Pair this with device-trust checks at elevation time, don’t allow role activation from unmanaged or non-compliant devices, even with perfect credentials.

Core PAM capabilities (and how passwordless fits)

Credential vaulting and rotation (minimize long-lived secrets)

Vaulting still has a place, for break-glass accounts, device-to-device secrets, or legacy systems, but it should be the exception. Where vaults are necessary, rotate aggressively and avoid human visibility of passwords. Better yet, replace vault-exposed secrets with short-lived, automatically issued credentials via federation or brokered sessions so that people never handle passwords at all. AC-2 and related NIST controls anticipate this direction with dynamic account activation and usage conditions.

Session management: brokering, recording, command control

Session brokers act as PEPs: they terminate connections, inject credentials server-side, mask secrets from humans, record inputs/outputs, and apply real-time policies (e.g., block file transfer or disallow dangerous commands). This strengthens forensics and deters misuse, particularly when paired with passwordless admin login and JIT elevation. Leading PAM implementations describe this as “Privileged Session Management,” which integrates with identity systems for step-up and approval workflows.

Approval workflows, time-bound access, and break-glass

Approvals calibrate friction to risk. Require tickets and stakeholder approvals for destructive changes; allow policy-driven auto-approval for routine, low-risk tasks, but always time-box. Maintain break-glass paths for genuine emergencies, tested regularly and instrumented with immediate alerts and post-use reviews; NCSC and Microsoft guidance emphasize having a small number of emergency accounts, isolating them from conditional access rules to maximize availability, and compensating with strict monitoring.

Secrets management for apps and CI/CD

For applications and pipelines, replace embedded secrets with short-lived tokens obtained at runtime via trusted identity flows, and store any necessary static material in a dedicated secrets manager with automated rotation. OWASP’s Secrets Management Cheat Sheet provides concrete practices across lifecycle, CI/CD, containers, and detection. Capabilities like dynamic database credentials narrow the compromise window from months to minutes and stop cross-service blast radius.

Implementing phishing-resistant authentication for admins

WWPass/WebAuthn, PIV/CAC, and platform authenticators

In privileged contexts, origin-bound, hardware-backed authenticators are table-stakes. WebAuthn/FIDO2 deliver that for web-based admin consoles, whether through platform authenticators like Windows Hello and Touch ID or roaming keys. PIV/CAC smart cards remain the gold standard in regulated sectors that mandate certificate-based authentication. For administrators who need to approve work on the go, device-bound passkeys paired with device-compliance checks are preferable to app-based OTP. If you are designing a passwordless rollout for PAM, ensure discoverable credentials are available for your admin portals and explicitly forbid fallback to SMS, voice, or email codes for privileged roles.

To move from “passwordless for users” to “passwordless for administrators,” consider a solution designed for enterprise-grade passwordless SSO with phishing-resistant authenticators and strong device binding. For example, WWPass describes how to deploy passwordless sign-in end-to-end, with login flows that avoid reusable secrets and align with Zero Trust principles, useful as a reference when you are mapping PAM policies to your IdP and brokering layer. See passwordless SSO on WWPass for an architectural overview, multi-factor authentication for factor options, and a practical deep dive into QR-code authentication patterns relevant to cross-device admin approvals. Their documentation provides integration specifics teams can hand to engineers during implementation.

Step-up policies for high-risk operations

Not all privileged actions are equal. Define high-risk operations, rotating production KMS keys, modifying identity provider policies, disabling logging, and require step-up to a phishing-resistant factor at the moment of execution, even if the user already holds a privileged session. NIST’s digital identity guidelines support transaction risk-based elevation; in Zero Trust terms, this is simply re-evaluation with stronger authentication when the sensitivity of the resource or action increases. Combine this with change-management linkage: a PEP should verify a ticket ID and scope before allowing the command to proceed.

Federation with IdP/SSO and PAM integration

PAM should not be a parallel identity silo. Federate it with your IdP via SAML or OpenID Connect, so that user lifecycle, risk signals, and device posture flow into the PDP, and role activation events are visible to governance systems. NIST’s federation guidance (SP 800-63C) and the federal SSO playbook outline patterns to accomplish this with strong assurance. The result is a single authentication authority issuing phishing-resistant assertions, with the PAM layer enforcing approvals, time limits, and session controls downstream.

Rollout plan

Prioritize crown-jewel systems & remote access first

A successful privileged access management rollout starts with ruthless focus. You will not win on day one by boiling the ocean; you win by decisively hardening the pathways that would hurt you most if abused. That means front-loading two categories: crown-jewel systems and remote access. Crown jewels are the systems where a single privileged action creates disproportionate risk, cloud control planes, directory services, hypervisors, CI/CD orchestrators, KMS/HSM consoles, production databases, identity providers, and monitoring platforms with write access. Remote access encompasses anything that lets administrators operate from outside the internal enclave, VPNs, bastion hosts, web admin portals, and management planes exposed on the internet. For both tracks, commit early to phishing-resistant authentication and just-in-time elevation; defer everything else until those flows are airtight. This aligns with Zero Trust fundamentals: never assume trust based on network location; interrogate every privileged action with fresh signals about identity strength, device posture, and session risk. When the first sprints end, the systems that can topple your enterprise should be the ones with the strongest login ceremony and the tightest time-boxed entitlements.

Treat prioritization as a living map, not a static spreadsheet. Revisit it as you learn which admin pathways are actually used versus what’s documented. You will typically find “shortcut” tooling, old consoles kept alive for break/fix, direct RDP/SSH access that bypasses the broker, and legacy dashboards with super-user cookies, that quietly expand the attack surface. Pull those into scope early; your goal is to ensure all privileged entry points route through the same policy decision and policy enforcement controls so that auth strength, approvals, recording, and termination are consistently applied. The NIST Zero Trust model is explicit about placing authoritative decision and enforcement points in front of sensitive resources; a PAM rollout operationalizes this pattern for administrator traffic.

When choosing the first authentication pattern, prefer origin-bound, hardware-backed options (WebAuthn/passkeys; PIV/CAC) for human administrators and ephemeral, brokered credentials for non-human use. The reason is simple: the most common compromise path in modern incidents remains credential theft and replay, and phishing-resistant MFA specifically breaks that loop. If your estate includes contractors or third-party maintainers, make your remote paths require these strong factors rather than passwords or OTP. That single decision collapses a long list of phishing, push-fatigue, and relay-attack scenarios.

As you plan the initial sprints, you’ll likely need to support cross-device approval flows for admins who use desktops with constrained hardware authenticators. In those journeys, QR-mediated authentication can keep the ceremony phishing-resistant while remaining ergonomic: the desktop presents a one-time challenge, the admin verifies and approves on a bound mobile authenticator, and the browser session is issued without exposing reusable secrets. If you need a concrete architecture and UX patterns to brief stakeholders, point them to a vendor-neutral description of passwordless SSO with passkeys and cryptographic QR approvals, and to implementation-oriented documentation that engineers can follow during proofs of concept. For instance, see WWPass materials on passwordless SSO for web & mobile apps, how QR-code authentication works, and their developer documentation; if your pilot needs user-facing onboarding, the WWPass Key App page helps non-technical stakeholders understand the authenticator lifecycle.

Admin inventory, policy design, pilot, expand, deprecate passwords

Begin with an accurate, defensible inventory of privileged identities and pathways. Enumerate human roles (cloud, directory, database, SOC, SRE on-call), machines (daemons, scheduled jobs), workloads (containers, serverless), and service accounts. Map each to the consoles, protocols, and APIs they use. Tie those to the policies and approvals currently required. Expect to discover shadow admins, users and groups with dormant but dangerous rights inherited through nested groups or old projects. NIST SP 800-53’s AC-2 family is a practical lens for this phase: define account types, restrict shared accounts, and institute dynamic privilege activation. Run access reviews against that baseline and schedule remediation for anomalies discovered during the rollout.

With the inventory in hand, design a policy model that separates “who may ever become privileged” from “who is privileged right now.” That is the essence of just-in-time access: permissions are potential until activated by a combination of strong authentication, ticket linkage, approvals, and context checks. Use your identity provider’s native capabilities where possible; for example, Microsoft Entra PIM natively supports time-bound activation, mandatory MFA on elevation, approvals, justifications, alerts, and audit exports that feed compliance. The more you can keep in your IdP and PAM broker rather than bespoke scripts, the better your long-term auditability and operator experience.

Plan a two-stage pilot. Stage one proves the login ceremony for administrators to critical web consoles and the brokering of RDP/SSH sessions through a PEP that records and enforces policy. Verify that device posture checks are respected and that non-compliant endpoints cannot activate roles. Stage two adds approvals and time-boxes, then removes legacy access paths and passwords for the pilot cohort. The exit criteria are crisp: no privileged web console accepts passwords or OTP for pilot users; all shell access routes through your broker; every elevation requires phishing-resistant step-up and expires; break-glass is configured and tested. Only when these pass with a manageable operator burden should you expand to the next set of roles and systems. Align your deprecation plan with change windows and give teams clear fallbacks that don’t regress to phishable methods.

Deprecating passwords is an outcome you phase, not flip. For each privileged system, track when passwords were last used, by whom, and for what. The goal is to shrink “standing secrets” to near zero. Where legacy constraints force a vault, ensure humans never see the password, use brokered injection or ephemeral certs, and rotate after every automated use. Enforce conditional access that blocks password flows for admin roles at your IdP; keep narrow exceptions with monitored, ticketed justification. This is how you translate a Zero Trust policy premise, continuous verification and least privilege, into operational gates that survive audits.

Monitoring, audit, and metrics

A rollout is not complete until you can prove it works and detect drift in time to matter. Build your monitoring on three pillars: event completeness, reviewability, and actionable metrics. Event completeness means that every privileged authentication, elevation, and session is logged with sufficient context to reconstruct “who did what, when, where, to which resource, and why.” Reviewability means those logs are normalized, retained, and routinely inspected or analyzed for anomalies. Actionable metrics are the performance indicators that tell you whether privileged access management is reducing risk or merely adding ceremony.

NIST’s long-standing guidance on log management remains relevant: define log sources and event types up front, ensure time synchronization, secure log transport and storage, and define roles and procedures for analysis and response. Modernized guidance and allied materials from CISA and international partners add pragmatic checklists for event quality and detection of fileless, “living-off-the-land” techniques. Use these to justify budget for log coverage and for SIEM/SOAR tuning that specifically targets administrator misuse and lateral-movement patterns.

What to log (who, what, when, where) and how to review

For authentication and elevation, capture user identity (including assurance level and authenticator type), device posture signals, source IP and geolocation, relying-party/app origin, policy decisions (allow/deny, step-up required), approvals and justifications, scope of elevation (role, permissions), and precise timestamps. For privileged sessions, capture session start/stop, target system and account, command summaries or full command logs where lawful, file transfer attempts, policy violations, and termination reasons. Map this to your control framework: NIST SP 800-53 AU-2 explicitly calls for identifying event types to be logged, including administrative privilege usage and credential events. Combine with Zero Trust guidance to treat policy decisions and enforcement outcomes as first-class telemetry; your PEP should emit structured allow/deny events for each privileged connection. Establish a daily automated review for high-risk anomalies (elevations outside business hours, unknown device posture, sessions initiated from atypical countries) and a weekly governance review of approvals, break-glass use, and exceptions.

To make reviews effective, build curated dashboards that answer specific questions: which identities elevated most this week; which systems saw the most admin activity; where step-up failed; which policies are causing outsized friction; which exceptions are nearing expiry. Couple dashboards with targeted alerts for misconfigurations, for example, if an admin portal begins accepting password flows again or if a high-risk role is activated without required approvals. A continuous monitoring mindset is vital; NIST’s ISCM materials provide a governance scaffold to keep reviews routine and evidence-driven rather than ad hoc.

KPIs: privileged session counts, emergency access usage, drift

Choose few but telling KPIs that connect privileged access management to risk reduction. Start with privileged session counts and median session duration by system and role; the trend you want is fewer, shorter, more deliberate sessions as automation and finely scoped APIs replace broad, manual administration. Track elevation rate (how often users activate roles) and time to elevation approval; these reveal both cultural adoption and potential bottlenecks. Measure emergency access usage and time since last break-glass test; for a healthy program, break-glass is rare, rehearsed, and reviewed the same day. Monitor drift as the delta between your source-of-truth entitlements and the actual privileges observed in the environment, especially nested group grants and forgotten service accounts. Finally, watch password exposure: count how many privileged systems still accept passwords or OTP for admins and drive that to zero. CISA’s Zero Trust maturity framing and NIST’s continuous-monitoring approach both encourage pre-established metrics that you revisit as your program matures; codify these in policy so they survive team turnover.

Pitfalls to avoid

Leaving recovery flows phishable

Your recovery and break-glass paths are part of your security boundary. If they hinge on email links, SMS codes, or voice calls, an attacker only needs to move you into that lane to bypass the strong controls you’ve erected elsewhere. Design recovery with the same rigor as day-to-day admin login: require hardware-backed authenticators and out-of-band checks that are resistant to phishing. In practice, organizations often exempt emergency accounts from Conditional Access to guarantee availability but then compensate by isolating them, using long random passwords sealed in an offline vault, monitoring every sign-in, and reviewing them immediately after use. Follow the vendor’s emergency-access guidance to the letter, keep the number of such accounts minimal, and rehearse the process so it does not degrade into unsafe shortcuts under stress.

If your administrators often work cross-device, make sure your recovery path supports secure cross-device authentication without introducing reusable secrets. Contemporary passwordless SSO patterns, including QR-mediated approvals bound to the correct origin, can provide reliability without opening phishing windows. When you document the operator runbook, include clear steps for recovering a lost authenticator and for transferring credentials to a new device with verification, your goal is to remove excuses for re-enabling passwords “temporarily.”

Shadow admin rights and unmanaged service accounts

The fastest way to undercut privileged access management is to let shadow admins and unmanaged service accounts linger. Shadow admins accumulate through nested groups, legacy migrations, and one-off exceptions; service accounts sprawl because automation grows faster than governance. Address both with a standing discover-and-remediate loop. Use IdP and directory insights, entitlement discovery in cloud providers, and your PAM tool’s analytics to surface identities with elevated rights that haven’t used them in 90 days, accounts without owners, and credentials that never rotate. NIST’s account-management control families back you here; pair them with time-bound entitlements and mandatory owner assignment before an identity can receive privileged potential. For service accounts that cannot yet adopt workload identity federation, place them under a secrets manager with aggressive rotation and a plan to deprecate to ephemeral credentials.

FAQs

Do I still need a vault if I’m passwordless?

A mature privileged access management program minimizes vault reliance but rarely eliminates it entirely. For human administrators, the destination is clear: no passwords, no OTP, no shared secrets, only phishing-resistant authentication for login and just-in-time elevation for roles. For non-human use, the north star is ephemeral credentials obtained at runtime via federation or short-lived certificates. Even so, there are stubborn corners: legacy appliances that cannot federate; BIOS or out-of-band interfaces that insist on static secrets; cross-domain integrations that are not yet modernized. Keep a vault for those and treat it as a quarantine for technical debt. Policies should ensure humans do not view the secrets; brokers inject them server-side, rotation is frequent, and every checkout leaves an auditable trail. Over time, plan migrations that replace these with federation and dynamic issuance so the vault shrinks rather than grows. This position aligns with both Zero Trust principles and practical vendor guidance that prioritizes JIT over standing credentials.

How does PAM interact with Zero Trust network segmentation?

Privileged access management and Zero Trust segmentation are complementary layers in the same strategy. Segmentation reduces the blast radius when something goes wrong; PAM reduces the chance and duration of things going wrong in the first place. In a Zero Trust model, the network no longer grants implicit trust: every admin connection, even inside the data center, is treated as potentially hostile until policy allows it. Your policy enforcement point (session broker, gateway, or cloud access proxy) becomes the only front door for privileged protocols; it authenticates with phishing-resistant factors, verifies device posture, checks approvals and ticket linkage, and then connects to the segmented target through allow-listed paths. Segmentation rules whitelist the broker’s egress, not every admin’s workstation, simplifying policy and making monitoring cleaner. The PDP/PEP separation from NIST 800-207 is a conceptual map for this architecture; CISA’s maturity model emphasizes adaptive enforcement as signals change, which translates into session termination or re-authentication when segmentation detects anomalous east-west movement. Privileged Access Workstations fit naturally into this: they are the hardened endpoints from which admin sessions may originate, further constraining trust chains.