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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

Please don't check your keys or passwords into github.

This was my first search to show AWS API Keys. [1] and my second to show google API keys. [2] Unfortunately, there are many more of these types of searches - and far too many results.

[1] https://grep.app/search?q=AKIA%5B0-9A-Z%5D%7B16%7D&regexp=tr...

[2] https://grep.app/search?q=AIza%5B0-9A-Za-z%5C%5C-_%5D%7B35%7...

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Most of these actually look like fake keys to mock data in unit tests.

As far as I can tell, all the git repos come from GitHub, and GitHub automatically sends you a warning if you commit access keys of various kinds (and I seem to remember they even de-activate some, maybe AWS keys, automatically? Not 100% sure about this). Most of the keys shown are unlikely to be working, especially the ones older than just a couple of days (either owner notice, or someone else was faster than you, got access and regenerated new keys for themselves)

> or someone else was faster than you, got access and regenerated new keys for themselves

There are many people who do these types of searches - regularly. If there is any key material checked into gh, consider it immediately compromised, even if the repo is removed.

Tons of automated scraping for these sort of things as well, with the whole flow of "check if key is working, check permissions, if authorized, generate new key and deactivate old one".

Yes. There are indeed several mitigations in place. However, my point was that within 5 seconds of looking at this tool I was able to uncover hundreds of potential issues. There are many other regexs I have on my list. Please don't fall into the trap of "we have anti-virus, so we can't get attacked."

Sorry if I was unclear, my previous comment was about attackers doing that in order to compromise infrastructure, not that companies are doing it in order to defend themselves. But companies probably do it to defend themselves as well, but I'm not as familiar with that as with the other side of things.

GitHub PM here, just confirming that that's correct (re: us sending detected secrets to the relevant service provider, who take action automatically). There's more detail here: https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/abo....

This is probably one of the single most important security measures on the whole internet.

Thanks for keeping an eye out.

https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+AKIA%5B0-9A-...

Sourcegraph is much better than this site.

Your search has a lot of false positives like AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE

Many of these are tests, false positives (e.g. base64 images or "Migration1599570560FixSlovakiaDisplayedAsSloveniaTest"), or examples from documentation.

Can't find a single match for an actual API key.

These are probably invalid by now.

https://grep.app/search?current=2&q=api_key%20%3D%20%22%5Ba-...

As others have posted, Github implemented an alerting system for keys/passwords/etc. that have been checked into the codebase. My guess is most of these will be invalidated by now, either by the developer requesting a new key (and not publishing it), or the provider invalidating it for them.

Most of the Google API keys look like they are client side keys and should be configured to only work on specific origins or apps.

Hacker noises - "I'm in"

----- BEGIN RSA NOT SO PRIVATE KEY -----

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