alt Hacker News> Lets take a concrete example, suppose you have AWS root account credentials. Are you going to assign them to one individual identity or as a company you would keep them accessible to a group of admins.
You’d use AWS Organizations so each admin authenticates using their own credentials, gets short-term credentials to access the member account for the handful of operations needing root, and audit usage. It’s not only more secure, it’s also easier:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_root-ena...
Old school, you’d have a shared password in an encrypted team vault (possibly requiring x of y users to decrypt it) and two FIDO tokens locked in a safe. Again, this is rare and at a federal agency you have a physical security team with 24x7 staffing so you can say “in an emergency, one of the people on this list can get a key out of a safe in the CIO’s office”.
great, now apply this to a 4 person startup who are just focussed to get business somehow. This is not on their radar and they would not be willing to spend money to address this either cause its not a problem that they are even aware of.
This is a tip of ice-berg, companies like openai, anthropic, perplexity, stripe, all of them have implemented their authentication and security flows in some interpreted language (python, ruby, typescript) cause that was the readily available talent on their product teams and most likely a good number of them do not even have their dependencies locked in.