Toyota suffered a data breach by accidentally exposing a secret key on GitHub
blog.gitguardian.com
blog.gitguardian.com
I felt like a bit of a dope but it was neat to have it happen to me. Lesson learned for sure.
https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/sec...
Next time I implement api keys I wonder if it’s worth going out of my way to make them easy to identify. Eg, by prefixing every key with a few well known characters. Like FMLA_xxxxx for a fastmail app key.
https://github.blog/2021-04-05-behind-githubs-new-authentica...
We will be applying thanks for sharing greystell
Yeah absolutely - I'd love to hear about it!
https://docs.github.com/en/developers/overview/secret-scanni...
Your dev team would probably be able to give that a glance and estimate the work.
It can be as simple as a script you have to run once, but it can't be automatic. Which also means you can't really trust contributors to do it, even if they're well-meaning some will forget.
https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/code-secu...
Also the “you” below is the generic you - not you personally.
Disclaimer: I work at AWS in Professional Services, all rants are my own.
Now with that out of the way, I hate the fact that there are way too many code samples floating around on the internet that have you explicitly put your access key and secret key in the initialization code for the AWS SDK.
s3 = boto3.resource(‘s3’,aws_accesskey_id=ccxx,aws_secret_access_key_id=cccc)
When all they have to do is
s3=boto3.resource(‘s3’)
All of the SDKs will automatically find your credentials locally in your .config file that is in your home directory when you run “aws configure”.
But really, you shouldn’t do that, you should use temporary access keys.
When you do get ready to run on AWS, the SDK will automatically get the credentials from the attached role.
Even when I’m integrating AWS with Azure DevOps, Microsoft provides a separate secure store that you can attach to your pipeline for your AWS credentials.
But yeah, if the wrong thing is easier or more straightforward than the right way, people tend to follow it when they have a deadline to meet. To end on a positive note, at least cli v2 makes bootstrapping the credentials to a workstation a tad easier!
I know I should know this seeing that I work in ProServe at AWS, but what do you mean?
I’m going to say there is never a use case for embedding credentials just so I can invoke Cunningham’s Law on purpose.
But when I need to test something in Docker locally I do
docker run -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<your_access_key> -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<your_secret_key> -e AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=<aws_region> <docker_image_name>
Sometimes you might need to use stuff that for some reason fails to use the envars, I think I’ve bumped into some stuff which reads s3 via self-rolled http calls. Dunno if it was to save from having boto as a dependency, but those things are usually straightforwardly engineered so no logic in figuring out the other, more smart ways to handle the keys. Here are the parameter slots, enter keys to continue.
I wasn't familiar with how AWS credentials are usually managed so I was very confused why I had to make my own struct and implement the `CredentialSource` trait on it. It felt like I was missing something... because I was. You're not supposed to enter the credentials directly, you're supposed to use the built-in EnvCredentialSource or whatever.
I’ll put things like server secrets and whatnot, there.
Of course, I need to make sure the local directory is backed up, on this end, since it is not stored in git.
Works a treat.
I am serious. If there is a better way, I'd use it.
Remember that I don't do online/server-based stuff. Most of my projects are for full compilation/linking, and rendering into host-executable, binary apps. There's a bunch of stuff in my development process that never needs to see a server.
[UPDATE] I ended up doing something even simpler. I have issues with running scripts during the build process, unless really necessary (I have done it, and will, again).
Since this is Xcode, I simply needed to store the file in a directory (still with the global ignored name) far out of my dev tree, and dragged the file into the IDE.
See, I thought that was a big strength of a lot of the AWS documentation over Google Cloud.
An AWS example for, say, S3 would show you where to insert the secrets, and it would work.
The Google Cloud Storage examples, though? It didn't seem to have occurred to them that someone reading "how to create bucket example" might not have their credentials set up.
And when the example didn't work - well, it was like the auth documentation was written by a completely different team, and they'd never considered a developer might simply want to access their own account. Instead the documentation was a mess of complicated-ass use cases like your users granting your application access to their google account; sign-in-with-google for your mobile app; and so on.
Google's documentation is better than it once was - but I've always wondered how much of the dominance of AWS arose from the fact their example code actually worked.
Just to clarify, I’ve never seen a code sample published by AWS that has you explicitly specifying your credentials. (Now I await 15 replies showing me samples hosted on Amazon)
But I can't understate how important it was that the AWS getting started guides said "Go to this URL, copy these values into this file" while Google's examples and getting started guides... didn't.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120521060506/http://aws.amazon... [2] https://github.com/amazonwebservices/aws-sdk-for-php/blob/ma...
But here is the newest documentation for PHP
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-php/v3/developer-guide/s...
Moral of the story: make your keys regexable without likelihood of false positives!
We should have our systems and precommit hooks then alert us when those enter places they shouldn't and help us automate rotation.
And what if your DEV is not actually well isolated from PROD/other infra? And what if some real data sneaked into DEV? Etc.
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25978185
Bonus: adding SRVCE_PRVT_{KEY} and SRVCE_PUB_{KEY}.
I also think that it should look just a bit cryptic to make a person unsure if they can meddle with the string.
How long does it take to get the response vs external bots pulling the data? What mechanisms does GitHub have in place to stop bots who monitor repo changes? I ask, as I have been there and it is super scary how fast someone/bot pulls repo data changes, as in minutes, and the repo we had back then was not popular.
https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=secret&s=updated&type=Rep...
But the commit still exists locally (since git is decentralized) so you now end up with a weird state that you have code you cannot push to origin. Definitely not a desirable feature.
> at least git itself can via hooks
I already said that:
> they can block it themselves with tools like gitleaks invoked on a pre-commit hook
The problem with git hooks is that they're not cloned with the repo. So you're reliant on the user installing those git hooks locally (sure, some repos will have helper scripts to install the hooks for you. But you're still reliant on the user running that script).
If there is data that should never be pushed to origin, then it is a highly desirable feature that the server block pushes that include that private data.
> The problem with git hooks
I was talking about GitHub's own git hooks that run on their servers, not about any local ones.
> is that they're not cloned with the repo.
It would be a terrible security issue if they were automatically enabled after cloning.
It’s already too late by that point because your secrets have already left the building. You’re not relying on upstream being honourable
> I was talking about GitHub's own git hooks that run on their servers, not about any local ones.
There’s no such thing. You can have CI tooling like GitHub Actions, but they’re a different beast to git hooks
> It would be a terrible security issue if they were automatically enabled after cloning.
It doesn’t have to be either/or. There are ways of having a sensible compromise. Like a git config that enables hooks from known safe origins. Or having the user promoted whether they want to install git hooks upon cloning.
True, but it is better than the secrets becoming entirely public, automated bots could be harvesting them and exploiting the resources they protect.
> There’s no such thing.
I would be surprised to here that GitHub doesn't actually run git on their servers. If they receive git pushes using git, then own git hooks are involved, ones that GitHub has written for their own purposes. They could simply add one to block bad pushes.
> Like a git config that enables hooks from known safe origins.
That sounds a bit terrifying to me, but I'm not of the GitHub generation.
> Or having the user promoted whether they want to install git hooks upon cloning.
That sounds like it would enable phishing-like attacks and people just clicking "yeah sure" without verifying the safety of the hook.
True. And some popular repos do already run into this problem. So it’s not a theoretical problem.
> I would be surprised to here that GitHub doesn't actually run git on their servers.
They’ve documented about how their backend works so there’s no need to speculate. They run an implementation of git but not the standard git CLI.
> If they receive git pushes using git, then own git hooks are involved, ones that GitHub has written for their own purposes. They could simply add one to block bad pushes.
They have their automation, GitHub Actions.
Sure they “could” also implement what you’ve described but it’s not how it currently works. So a pointless argument since we could be here all year discussing the literal infinity of different things Github “could” do in theory but that their infrastructure doesn’t currently support.
> That sounds a bit terrifying to me, but I'm not of the GitHub generation.
What I posted has literally nothing to do with GitHub. In fact if your origin is private git server (as I started out using git, since GitHub didn’t exist back then) then it’s even easier to designate a trusted origin. This approach makes total sense for businesses. Doesn’t work so well for open source but it’s just one option of many.
> That sounds like it would enable phishing-like attacks and people just clicking "yeah sure" without verifying the safety of the hook.
Potentially yes. But if you’re cloning a git repo, making code changes and then committing it back, you’d hope that individual is competent enough to audit the git hook. At the very least, they’ll be running the build scripts locally to unit test their changes, so it’s not like that phishing attack isn’t already present. Feels very much like you’re looking for reasons to dismiss any suggestions here rather than have an intelligent discussion.
Mind you, your secrets need to have a distinctive format in order for this to work. Probably a distinctive prefix is enough.
An Unethical Life Pro-Tip (that the word is already out on anyway, so I don't feel too bad):
• The content of Github public repos is all continuously loaded (by Github themselves) as a public dataset into BigQuery — https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/github/....
• For about $500, you can use BigQuery to extract all matches of a particular regexp, from every file, in every commit, in every public Github repo.
Whether or not Github themselves use this to power their secret scanning, arbitrary third parties (benevolent or not) certainly can use it for such. And likely already do.
Also I'd hope that Google is scanning BigQuery queries for that abuse signal.
https://github.blog/changelog/2018-08-01-new-delay-public-ev...
Disclosure: I'm an ex-GitHub employee but was not involved in the secret scanning API.
Mind you, the Github dataset isn't the leak itself; the leak is the public repo that the user pushed their key to. The dataset just makes such searches scalable / cost-effective to third parties who aren't already indexing Github for some other reason.
It was taking too long to get a new temp demo license key and GitHub search with clever filters helped me track down a demo key that was recently uploaded to a test repo.
This is also why I use git-secrets in my repos.
A friend once told me he was having a hard time getting a client to take his security concerns seriously. So I went on github and found a commit in their repo that included a production password and sent it to him. Maybe took 5-10 minutes to find? Apparently once they found out about the commit, they panicked a bit and started taking his concerns more seriously.
Yet another reason we need to adopt standards like security.txt and make it easy to report these things as it is to tell robots to ignore us with robots.txt. See securitytxt.org for more on the project.
That and also security is just hard to scale. That's why if it was mandated by legislation, companies would be forced to spend a comparable amount on scaling their security teams and efforts.
We get a lot of things that boil down to "When I go to your website, I am able to see the content of your html files!" ... yes, reporter. That is what a web server does. It gives you HTML files. Congrats that you have figure out the dev console on your browser, but you're not a hacker. I'm trying to go with Hanlon's razor here and assume this is inexperienced people and not outright scams.
We don't get a lot of these, but they far outweigh actual credible reports. But we try our best and take everything seriously until it can get disproven. And it's exhausting. So I get it sometimes. Sometimes having a place for responsible disclosure just opens yourself up to doing more paperwork (verifying that the fake reports are fake). That said, we still do it.
100% this. And it bites harder when you’re a scrappy time constrained startup, or just offering a public service.
I maintain a public API that returns public information- observable facts about the world. As such, the API doesn’t have any authn/z. Anyone can use it as little or as much as they want, free of charge.
Of course I get at least 1 email per year telling me my API is insecure and that I should really set up some OAuth JWT tokens and blah blah blah.
I used to reply telling them they are wrong but it gets hostile because they want money for finding the “vulnerability”.
On the flip side, at another company I once got a security@ email that sounded like a false alarm. I quickly wrote it off and sent a templates response. Then they came back with screenshots of things that shocked me. It was not a false alarm. That guy got paid a handsome sum and an apology from me for writing him off.
It's possible "security isn't a concern" because they are dismissing the report, not the security.
Old school one when I was a security consultant for a bit (pre-automated pentest scammers). Medium size regulated fintech. Domain admin passwords and admin accounts were stuck on post it notes on a board in the machine room. If you went over the road to the college, asked to use the toilet, which they seemed fine with, and poked your 200mm lens out of the bathroom window you could snap them all.
Don't assume that level of competence improved with addition of technology.
Did some consulting for an org that did managed IT and found that they wrote on a white board all of their passwords. Wrote them an email basically telling them "hey maybe you should erase that". May or may not have billed them for the time it took to write that email.
They put a piece of paper over the passwords in response.
At least, until you have a network-attached webcam pointed at your whiteboard.
But the solution to the webcam problem is to write its access credentials on your whiteboard, thus forming a circular and perfectly secure loop.
I've seen it done hundreds of times...
What do you use?
Also, I no-joke heard of a company that absolutely, unironically, did the webcam thing with RSA tokens.
My current manager is delightfully paranoid about security, so maybe I'll do it again to see if he says anything.
You cannot access org's repos without VPN
if you create a new repo by mistake outside your org, then uhh..., it's crazy?
it's like sending email with credentials to people outside your org
Note: the invite input box actually autocompletes ALL github usernames.
I'm sorry, but that's wild. That's like, not even an easy engineering problem to solve necessarily, given their size!
I've done it before, it's not as impressive as it seems.
With trigrams you can even do precise substring search on this scale with good performance.
If you'd like, I can build a small demo.
If the target user hasn't added their corp email to their profile then they can't be part of the org.
This is what GitLab does with their hosted AD/LDAP connector.
I’m in fear of mistyping something and inviting the wrong person.
Though it would still allow "collaborators" which don't have SSO requirement.
The fact that no one bats an eye that GitHub is used to store proprietary source code is so surprising to me. Conversely if that is what it is meant for, why does it default to autocompleting to all users globally instead of my org (even on the enterprise version.) why hasn’t this been fixed for years.
I've had contractors publish my code to public Github repos to showcase their work for their next job. Even after emailing them multiple times, I kept finding my code in github with companies emailing me asking for a referral to this person...
I feel like this is copy-pasted from a pitch deck on why GitGuardian should be funded. Does anyone reading the article care about this anecdote? Like do people stop reading at "well I'm one of the 7% that doesn't" or think "wow a lot of people are using Git, I should buy their thing"?
Sorry for the meta comment, but it just stuck out as odd to me.
To properly handle secret scanning requires calling live APIs to test if keys are "real". And you need to have a way to file tickets when you do have findings... if you rotate a cred from production, that's now an outage, so you need to coordinate multiple teams.
It's a lot of work and free tools only solve one part of this. I can't speak to any of the vendors in this space but I can attest that it's a harder problem than it seems!
More specifically, none of the paid security products we use cost nearly as much, and those products do much more than just detecting secrets. So from that standpoint, the pricing just seems outrageous. It’s pretty clearly aimed at big enterprises that can afford it and are vulnerable to FUD (while the “hobbyist” pricing is just free advertising). I don’t blame them for finding a way to make big money, but this business model is not what we’d pick.
We need to get PII as a liability on companies’ balance sheets to get them to take it seriously and to collect only the minim viable data.
> customer identification numbers and emails
to provide service? Seriously?
“T-Connect enables features like remote starting, in-car Wi-Fi, digital key access, full control over dashboard-provided metrics, as well as a direct line to the My Toyota service app. The servers that control these options contain unique customer identification numbers and customer emails.”
In general, apps and sites these days hoover up more info than they need simply because they can, not because it adds to the customer experience (and often doesn't help the company either). There is no incentive to be in any way judicious about what to collect and the frequent breaches show that even the companies don't value PII as something worth protecting because it's not core to their business.
If an organisation is disorganised enough to leave critical details in public, they're probably too disorganised to handle someone reporting it.
Or alternatively, if GitHub Secret Scanning was available to all public repos, instead of requiring a (very) expensive GitHub Advanced Security subscription. But I understand, they need to make money somehow.
I think we would consider GG if its pricing was acceptable for non-profits though.
People don't think a lot about what they put on there it seems. Or maybe font foundaries haven't sued enough at this point.
Either you'd use an encryption algorithm that depended on a "deeper" key... or you'd fetch the new key while authenticated with, you guessed it, another "deeper" key.
It's keys all the way down. Every key you use, it's your responsibility to keep it private.
(Unless you want to be dealing with physical hardware dongles that generate keys, but those aren't exactly easily portable.)
I'm not sure I really see the point, but I guess you could lock down the main call on another system, store the temporary token somewhere, and have the other systems use it.
As you say, you still need the top level credentials somewhere to get a new token.
What you have to consider is that starting a service is often not just a one time fire-and-forget operations. Applications crash need auto-restart, usually via systemd, kubernetes or something. So the keys-all-the-way down knowledge need to be integrated throughout that whole stack or on the side of it.
Kubernetes ServiceAccounts are based on a very similar flow, they are temporary certificates that are mounted into each Pod, used to connect to the API server and deciding what that Pod is allowed to access.
1. someone adds new service/server/infra in a submarine manner
2. it goes to prod
3. the cert expires and outage begins
4. my team is asked what to do, because "we're the cert experts"
5. we add it to the monitoring
So it only happens once … per service. Which isn't great. But how do you get people to slow down and do simple shit, like add a monitor to your new service? (Or promulgate a design doc…)
This still doesn't protect against the vector where somebody else in the company has managed to prove themselves to be responsible parties to another CA/issuer.
And, like I said, usually it's someone who doesn't grok certs doing it without asking for help in the first place, so they're not going to get why ACME. (Because I am tired of doing cert renewals. I've had enough for a lifetime…)
Your processes are failing your development teams, and you need to fix them, rather than blaming your teams, which achieves nothing.
2. Email everyone who might be involved a note about this and a link to the documentation and why it is important.
3. Next time someone ignores it, rip them and their manager a new orifice.
4. Wait for word of #3 to spread.
Might help...
We do (now) follow the CT logs for ourselves. That catches some cases, but not everything.
The wildcards would be tough but you could follow cnames as those would need to be in the cert as is.
For example it's one line for me to configure a new machine infrastructure built to have a certificate for myservice.myorg.example, and there's a Wiki page reminding me what the line is, or I can look at lots of services which already work. If I do that, the automation happens from the outset, my service never has a custom cert or lacks monitoring, it has monitoring from day zero and its certificates are automated. I happen to really care about ACME and the Web PKI and so on - and would have gone the extra mile to do this, but I was astonished on Week One at my current employer to realise oh, this is just how everything works here, the Right Thing™ is just easier.
Does your company have a Wiki page saying how to do it wrong? After writing the page about the right way, update the bad wiki page with a link to your new page, and cross through all the previous text, or even just delete it.
If you have firewall rules or a proxy, block random unauthorised stuff. This is probably a reasonable strategy anyway. Now they come to you to unblock their "submarine" service, and before you do that's the opportunity to insist on proper certificate behaviour.
But then we get some vendored product that manages to be completely unable to run in k8s, devs avoid the automation for $reasons, etc.
> Does your company have a Wiki page saying how to do it wrong?
Sometimes we do! I've found a few of these after really pressing the point of "why are you doing it this way?" hard enough. But you have to a.) get an answer to that and b.) the answer has to reveal they followed some shadow docs.
> If you have firewall rules or a proxy, block random unauthorised stuff.
Your rouge service implementer just creates their own VPC; they are in control of the firewall.
Should my security team either set appropriate privileges or delegate that to my team? Perhaps. I have to get them to adopt like RBAC and ABAC first; they fervently believe our industry's regulations forbid "job function begets access" (i.e., RBAC) type policies. (They desire that, even if a job function begets access, that if you're not needing to exercise that access, it should be revoked until such a time that it is required to be exercised. But this means that you end up with "all security reqs. must flow through security team" style thing, and there are then a lot of them (because they are so ephemeral) and so any process must inherently be ignorant of whether the request is right. So your rouge implementor's request for "I need to implement $high level service" is basically carte blanche.
The thing about shadow-docs and shadow-services is that they're hard to find out about in a timely manner. A lot of these comments are fighting the very core of human nature.
(We used to be better about this as a company, back when we were very engineer heavy, and filled with good engineers — most better than me. The quality bar definitely fell at some point, and we've hired a lot of not engineers doing things that really would be better served by an engineer. Y'all are working at rainbow companies, and I don't know how to keep a company in that state or move it to that state as a bottom-of-rungs eng.)
At my org, we even try to generate all secrets with a standardize prefix/suffix so as to make them very greppable. That doesn't stop "Architects", "Customer Solutions", "Analytics" types from … just working around the standard tooling and manually generating one by hand because … IDK, they think they know better? I really don't get it.
IIRC they even basically got some hospital admin fired for creating a hand washing mandate, despite it being proven to save lives.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/3756639...
(talking centuries ago, but maybe even today)
Looks like its still a "recent" issue, lol https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24wwln_freak.htm...
I have git hooks to lint code syntax, but nothing for scanning for leaked credentials. Looking @ TruffleHog now, mentioned by another poster.
I mean, I'll bet Toyota knew this organizationally. They had security people sign off on the design who all knew how secure key management is supposed to work. They probably reviewed this github release. And it happened anyway.
Maybe they weren't supposed to be production keys. Maybe it was a development key from someone's early cut of the tooling that got mistakenly reused for production. Maybe a script that updated all the keys mixed up which was which.
The point is that the existence of a Clear And Unambiguous Right Thing to Do is, in practice, not sufficient to ensure that that thing is done. The space of ways to mess up even obvious rules is too big.
And that's surprising, which is why (1) it keeps happening and (2) people like you don't take the possibility seriously in your own work.
IaC, right? If you don't put keys into the Code you can't have Infrastructure as Code. Without keys the code only partially defines your infrastructure.
Assuming you have been given the right tooling, there is no reason for it to be in source code.
Because EnvKey integrates tightly with environment variables, no app code changes are needed to switch, so it only takes a minute or two to import/integrate a typical app.
EnvKey is designed to help avoid incidents exactly like the one that just hit Toyota, while staying out of your way and even making your life significantly easier as a developer by simplifying many aspects of config management.
Give it a look if you know you have some room for improvement in this area and are looking for an easy, secure, open source, end-to-end encrypted solution :)
However, I'm currently working with a group using Terraform on GCP (GKE), and it's popular with them to use Secret Manager to manually create a secret in there (when it cannot be auto-gen'd with the IaC, a fairly small subset of things) and then reference that secret from the infra-defining code.
I think of it as being akin to "this service requires a correctly configured FOO_BLAH variable in it's environment". I don't really see it as any failure of achieving some IaC goal, but defining infrastructure code isn't my primary function, so take this with a grain of salt.
Now, it's an embedded maps api key, there's no cost to use it, nobody can use it from a domain other than mine, and it's easily visible in the page source if someone views that, so there's really no reason not to commit it since even if I didn't commit to somewhere publically, it's still publicly available on my website and nobody else can use it anyway.
Is this a reasonable exception to this rule?
You could use Google actions to build your pages site injecting the api key at build time. It’s stored a repo secret rather than in code. Of course since you deploy the site publicly, the key will still be visible.
This is normally not a problem since databases should not be exposed to everyone one the Internet.
> One of the benefits of Git is that everyone has a complete copy of the project they are working on.
This is one of the problems with GIT and many programming langs. Because of this full copies of entire code bases are everywhere. GIT also only has ACL on repo level.
In many langs it is recommended to not store credentials in the code but at the same time there are no guidelines for how to store credentials. If you use cloud services there are recommendations.
Edit: Btw, which git service where they using? Cause I believe Github and others monitor code bases for accidental pushes of secrets.
[1] Notable, friend in the security biz had the advice that stored keys and passwords should never just work.
- Toyota
( reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTiLnz23TNs )
Anyone have details, theories, or a book on how such inefficiencies come about? I can't speak to tech-oriented large orgs but I've worked with others and its just... I'm not shocked at all. I've seen public facing API keys in HTML, private SSH keys that do god knows what in plaintext on FTP servers... I just don't understand how they seem to care so much but in reality, care so little. Just lazy?
Not lazy, just overburdened by more important things.
At larger orgs, I notice they take it "seriously" but that results in people finding creative loopholes... like pasting in all the important production keys/passwords into a google doc and sharing the google doc because they "can't send secrets over slack" ... lol
The building has multiple methods of access at different stages. During the course of doing your job, you don't follow the proper protocols a few times. You closed a door without re-entering a lock code. You didn't check someone's badge and ID at the third floor access gate. You forgot to make sure someone swiped out on exit.
Nobody actually trained you on any of those protocols; they just made you watch a "security is everyone's responsibility" video and then expected you to know all the protocols. Maybe once or twice you were lazy, but it's equally likely you just didn't know what to do. And once you make that mistake, somebody can exploit it as long as you don't follow the protocol.
In facilities where security is important, there are safeguards. Doors left open sound an alarm, automatically lock when closed, and sensors detect if more than one person walks through without badging in. These safeguards exist because people are fallible and need help to enforce security. Companies without security safeguards either don't care, or are ignorant.
I bet someone made a security key because it was the right thing to do but they didn't have the controls in place to manage it in their build system and give another key to developers/engineers/etc. So someone else copied it for convivence rather than have to explain to every moron in the whole company how to use it to access the database or run their monolith tests or get access from the dude that no longer works there who was the "giver" of access keys.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/583785.The_Systems_Bible
As another commenter said, though, this is not the case in regulated industries, in the parts of those companies dealing with regulated processes, controls and data access.
Also basic security knowledge isn't screened for in hiring nor is it really taught in most orgs (aside from trainings that people skip or optional stuff).
Could an attacker have remote-unlocked and remote-started the entire Toyota fleet with this access?
What if companies using secret keys (not SaaS providers who generate secret keys) voluntarily send their secret keys (MD5 hashed or somehow encrypted) to GitHub and GitHub can then monitor their leakage and notify the company?
Is this useful or feasible?
I'm thinking of a generic approach which is independent of where you got the secret key and its format.
Most common answer was „Developers”
It do be like that. Without proper automation and processes and education of ppl involved it can get really bad.
Thank you https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/
[1] https://blog.gitguardian.com/safely-open-source-software-bes... [2] https://blog.gitguardian.com/leaking-secrets-on-github-what-...