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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

It's incredibly disappointing actually how often this happens.

I can't count the amount of SO questions I've had to edit from others posting live API Keys for everything from custom services to AWS.

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I wonder if you could make a luhn-like check that would require an additional approval step to post if it comes back positive. Something like "It looks like you may be posting a secret *****. Do you wish to continue?

I was thinking about that too, but it's actually tricky, even the example given, they use the var `accessId` but you could filter for all that, even the standard ones, but you couldn't have enough confidence in it so that if someone did post with a typo or even a random var name, they would think "Okay, no warning so must be okay".

Something like giving false confidence to the user. Not the best idea.

If vendors agreed to a common prefix on all secret key values then it'd be easy for everyone to add checks, to everything. Something like "_SECRET88_".

Of course, then your secret key checker would need to build that string by concatenating so that it wouldn't set off itself.

More and more providers have been adding unique prefixes to their tokens and access keys which makes detection much easier. Ex, GitLab adds `glpat-` to their PAT.

A project I maintain, Gitleaks, can easily detect "unique" secrets and does a pretty good job at detecting "generic" secrets too. In this case, the generic gitleaks rule would have caught the secrets [1]. You can see the full rule definition here [2] and how the rule is constructed here [3].

[1] https://regex101.com/r/CLg9TK/1

[2] https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks/blob/master/config/g...

[3] https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks/blob/master/cmd/gene...

How about scanning for any string with high entropy? Might be easier to get buy-in if we don’t all have to bike-shed over what the prefix is.

That’s helpful but the token prefixes are also helpful. You might be interested in GitHub’s reasoning at https://github.blog/2021-04-05-behind-githubs-new-authentica...

RFC 8959 registered the 'secret-token:' prefix / URI scheme.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8959.html

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. Lots of secrets are "generic" (think of a DB user/password combination), meaning that you need to take into account the surrounding source code context to be able to determine if they are a "real" secret.

Here is a full explanation if you are interested: https://blog.gitguardian.com/why-detecting-generic-credentia...

Indeed, last year we detected on average 84 AWS IAM creds for every 10k commits pushed to GitHub

https://res.cloudinary.com/da8kiytlc/image/upload/v164614852...

When you do this is there a way to completely get rid of the information? Usually you can go back an look at the edit history to see the original post.

Change the keys.

Yeah mods can clear the review history - for this very reason!

But as mentioned below - Still advised to change your keys for obvious reasons

Wouldn't matter. Tons of bots are scraping every inch of the internet all the time, and if something been online for five seconds, it has been cached/stored somewhere. Always assume that anything you've put up on the internet, can forever be accessed by someone.

The only thing you can do is rotating the token/secret.

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-that-guy

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