Platform & DevOps·Secrets, identity and the supply chain
there is a sealed credential that bypasses every control, its use pages three people, and it has been used twice.
Break-glass access
Also calledemergency access, break glass account
A deliberately preserved emergency path to full access for when the normal ones fail — the identity provider is down, the automation is broken, the on-call cannot get in. It has to exist, because a control with no override becomes an outage of its own, and it must be loud: heavily audited, alerting on use, and rotated afterwards. It also needs testing, since an emergency path that depends on the system that is down is not one.