The complex metallurgy associated with the typical Nickel based corrosion resistant alloys (CRA) bring forward the presence of phases which can assist environment-induced cracking. This paper presents a review of the published literature on the fields of localized corrosion and stress corrosion cracking to describe the fundamental problems that need to be addressed so reliable environmental service envelopes can be identified for this type of CRA within the oilfield application conditions. The review study indicates that the passive layer instability is associated with the conditions where stress corrosion cracking can occur, hence the systematic study of the effect of the main independent variables (temperature, chloride content and sour gas CO2/H2S ratio and S0) on passivity is critical to understand the application envelopes for these alloys