How high-stress crises turn temporary backdoors into permanent security vulnerabilities (and how to prevent such a situation)
Plan B is an essential step for every strategy. It is particularly essential for organizational security, as like any war, another strategy is needed if Plan A doesn’t work. In fact, a break-glass account may not fit the description of a Plan B. Calling it Plan Z would be more accurate. And since it is the last resort, what is essentially a backdoor actually is an ethically necessary strategy. After all, what course of action is left in a situation where normal authentication fails, such as during outages, lockouts, or breaches? However, curiously, while they are justifiably a double-edged sword, these accounts are almost never rolled back.
Why?
A key reason why these accounts are never rolled back is stated in the opening itself. This account is the very last option. These accounts are needed only for high-stress operational crises, not controlled maintenance windows. These crises include a domain controller locked down, failure of a privileged access management (PAM) system, a cloud control plane becoming inaccessible, or an MFA provider going offline. In such situations, the affected organizations’ sole focus is on restoring operations. The emergency account is activated, controls are bypassed, and teams regain access. Once the incident is over, rolling back the account requires a new change window, new approvals, and fresh coordination across teams. Keeping it just as it is makes more sense from the perspective of urgency.
The second reason is related to visibility because of the accounts’ privileges. These accounts often bypass exactly the systems that would otherwise enforce rollback. These accounts are intentionally designed to function when identity governance, PAM, or MFA infrastructure is unavailable. This also means they are frequently (of course, unknowingly) above the controls that manage lifecycle, policy enforcement, and credential rotation in an enterprise. If your IAM platform drives automatic role revocation, password expiration, or policy checks, but the break glass account lives outside that system, there is no automated trigger to revert it. The rollback becomes a manual task, and manual tasks without deadlines are rarely completed.
The next reason is ownership. Just like the rhetorical question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes” or who watches the watchmen, there is no clear answer to the question “who owns a break glass account?” In most organizations, standard accounts have clear owners: HR owns the employee lifecycle, IAM owns provisioning, security owns policy, and application teams own access requests. There is no such clear ownership for break glass accounts. During an incident, the operations team may activate the account. After the incident, no one is certain who is responsible for resetting it.
The issue is further fueled by audits. Let us be frank. No auditor will be happy if organizations do not have backup plans in case of an emergency. They will check if the account is logged, documented, and monitored. That’s about it. As long as the account exists and is monitored, the organization passes the audit, even if it is permanently over-privileged. Also, given the privileges involved, rolling back such an account will be a tedious process. There are conditional access policies to be reinforced, rotate credentials, re-enable MFA, re-establish PAM controls, and verify that logging and alerting are restored. So, to sum it up, it is an overprivileged account with less visibility and a tedious rollback process. The next question that naturally comes, it is a double-edged sword, as stated in the beginning, but what does the (other) edge consist of?
The less obvious dangers include authentication architecture drift. Break glass accounts are deliberately engineered to survive control-plane failures. As the identity stack modernizes, the break glass accounts’ trust assumptions also need to be updated. If this doesn’t happen, you end up with two parallel authentication realities. The first is the hardened, modern one, and the emergency path stuck on legacy settings. This inconsistency introduces fragility. The risk is not that no one sees it, but that it diverges quietly from the rest of the security architecture. So, when an emergency situation arises, the account will function in unexpected ways, potentially exacerbating the situation further.
Sanket Kadam, Senior Security Analyst at QKS Group, explains, “Break-glass accounts should be treated as a controlled emergency access mechanism, invoked only when standard identity and access controls are unavailable and operational continuity is at risk. Their use during a crisis must follow a predefined activation protocol, including out-of-band authentication methods such as hardware security keys, offline time-based tokens, or vault-secured credentials that remain independent of the primary identity plane. Activation should require multi-party authorization involving security leadership and operations to ensure separation of duties and real-time oversight. Every invocation must be fully logged, time-bound, and followed by mandatory credential rotation and control restoration once normal access pathways are re-established. This disciplined approach preserves resilience while preventing emergency access from becoming a persistent governance vulnerability.”
The second effect is also, curiously, may be comparable with gaming. A break glass account is akin to typing IDDQD while playing Doom. It is good for newbies, but the skill degrades over time if you keep using it. Similarly, when engineers know there is a guaranteed override, they may tolerate architectural brittleness longer. Instead of eliminating tight couplings or redesigning fragile identity dependencies, teams may rely on the emergency escape hatch.
The biggest, and perhaps the most obvious threat, is from malicious insiders because of the elevated privileges.
So, what is the solution?
The simplest solution is enforcing 2FA, but with a caveat. The second factor should be independent of the primary identity plane. It can be hardware-bound cryptographic keys stored offline, time-based tokens generated by devices that are not managed through the compromised environment, or controlled physical access mechanisms tied to a separate vaulting system. A key reason is that keeping your secondary factor on your primary identity plane may be a futile effort in case of an incident affecting that first. But this solution should be a starting step. Because it does not solve insider exposure, governance collapses during crisis, root-of-trust fragility, or rollback negligence.
The second part would be to bind account activation with multi-party authorization that includes security leadership and operational leadership. This ensures the separation of duties even in a crisis. The authorization event is timestamped, recorded, and tied to a specific declared incident. If no incident number exists, activation is invalid.
This should be followed by ensuring that emergency privileges expire automatically. Access should be granted with a cryptographic or policy-based timeout that forces reversion unless explicitly renewed under a new approval cycle. Human reminders are insufficient. Automation must enforce state reversion.
The next step would be particularly useful to reduce insider risk. No individual should both retrieve and activate a break glass credential. Storage should be isolated, typically in an offline or hardware-bound vault with strict access logging. Retrieval requires one set of approvers. Activation requires another.
Next, the accounts must not share all failure domains with the primary identity stack to reduce the risk of hidden coupling. The logic is simple. If the environment relies on a federated identity provider, the emergency mechanism must retain at least one non-federated recovery path.
Ultimately, coming back to the “break glass” name, it is a last resort, a failsafe. There is a reason why dangerous weapon systems are some of the most heavily secured and monitored ones. You can never be too sure about their security, but you still need them to keep you safe from other threats.