I found 39 Algolia admin keys exposed across open source documentation sites | Hacker News Reader

I found 39 Algolia admin keys exposed across open source documentation sites

benzimmermann.dev

159 pointskernelrocks48 comments

Hey, I'm Natan, Engineering Manager at Algolia. I wanted to acknowledge the issue raised in this thread and for posterity, show how we’re responding.

Some DocSearch implementations exposed write/admin API keys in public frontend config. That should not happen, but sometimes it does, and it underscores the importance of making API key roles and safe usage clearer. Only search-only keys belong client-side. Exposed privileged keys can allow unauthorized index changes or deletion.

We've contacted affected users directly to rotate exposed keys, move privileged keys to backend-only environments, and verify that public configs use search-only keys only.

More broadly, this is a reminder that education and guardrails around API key usage matter, and we're taking that seriously. We’ll continue to ensure this advice is surfaced more prominently throughout our product, and also look to enforce better guardrails to hopefully mitigate it before it happens.

Cheers, Natan

Twenty years ago every PHP website had search. We forgot how to do it.

To be fair, the search was thanks to databases and it was usually not very good (it takes work to set correctly).

I remember that time, it was usually better to go to google and use "site:".

I still do that for almost everything.

Having a search and having a functional search are two very different things though. To this day, the search on many sites is so bad that it's actually better to use a search engine and scope by site rather than use the site search.

So why hasn't the HomeAssistant docs page been nuked yet?

Man, talk about unnecessary graphs... ok graph 2 is maybe tolerable, although it's showing the popularity of the projects, not a metric of how many errors/vulnerabilities found in those projects.

I'm not a newspaper editor, but I think if this was an article for one, they'd also say the graphs are unnecessary. It smells of "I need some visual stuff to make this text interesting"...

It's Friday night / Saturday morning. Who wants to be reading text?

Especially on night mode themes.

Besides, can we read anymore? In the age of 'GPT summarise it me' attention spans and glib commentary not about the content of the article being all many people have to add, perhaps liberal application of visualisations adds digestive value.

Dude there’s only three graphs in there. Do they really bother you that much? The third may be a bit unnecessary but I think the visuals add to the post.

Thanks for this. I was maybe using one of these keys until this morning. When I logged in at dashboard.algolia.com and went to Settings -> API Keys, I found that none of the keys (Search, Analytics, Usage, Monitoring) matched the key I was using on a frontend. I made a decent attempt looking for that old key anywhere in their admin panels and could not find it. poof!

So perhaps at some point, they were only giving admin keys (because I don't remember there being a choice; and I would think given the choice I'd make the right one) and when called out (or sometime prior) realized the problem and made a new Settings -> API Keys page. Currently on the page the first one listed is the Search Key, with the subtext "This is the public API key which can be safely used in your frontend code. This key is usable for search queries and it's also able to list the indices you've got access to."

Is this aloglia's (or any provider) responsability or each individual integration ?

Algolia really needs to make using the admin key less easy. I’ve almost copied it before when setting up a frontend. It should be tucked away and require auth to view.

the wildest part is algolia just not responding. you email them saying "hey 39 of your customers have admin keys in their frontend" and they ghost you? thats way worse than the keys themselves imo. like the whole point of docsearch is they manage the crawling FOR you, but then the "run your own crawler" docs basically hand you a footgun with zero guardrails. they could just... not issue admin-scoped keys through that flow

Why contact Algolia when it is the users' responsibility to handle their keys? Contact all the users.

If this happens so often, perhaps Algolia should improve their stuff to prevent this? For example, by implementing a dedicated search endpoint that doesn't accept normal API keys, but only dedicated read-only keys.

It is the users responsibility to operate foot guns responsibly.

because if it's easy to dangerously use one's product that reflect poorly on the product. Algolia should help its clients from making silly mistakes.

The comment you're responding to is output of an LLM.

Note all the very similar grey comments at the bottom of the page.

ill take that as a compliment, my writing finally passed the turing test

https://www.algolia.com/security.txt 404

still 404 but the standard is .well-known/security.txt

Great write up. Reminder that if you commit these to a Github Gist and the provider partners with GitHub for secrets scanning, they’ll rapidly be invalidated.

That's just a tautology.

"If the secrets issuer partners with X-corp for secret scanning so that secrets get invalidated when you X them, then when you X them the secrets will be invalidated".

The above is a true statement for all X.

? Yes? Toomuchtodo is reminding the author (and other commenters), that github gists are one way to make sure secrets are secured / remediated before making a public post like this. Maybe not the most responsible whitehat action, but I can see it being useful in some cases where outreach is impractical / has failed.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Algolia has implemented this

I'm not following this at all. It seems like OP is saying if you share a secret in your (private?) gist and give Algolia permission to read the gist, they will invalidate it. But why would the secret be in a gist and not a repo? Also if you're aware enough to add that partner it seems you're aware to not do dumb things like that in the first place.

If you find an exposed token in the wild, for a service supported by GitHub Secret Scanning, uploading it to a Gist will either immediately revoke it or notify the owner.

Ok I see, so any public gist with an algolia key in it will get invalidated? And it would have to follow some pattern like ALGOLIA_KEY=xxx ?

it works for any gist, public or private. it doesn't need to follow a certain format. it's just based on how the secret itself is formatted—it works for secrets that have a predictable pattern, like the AWSK prefix for Amazon keys.

if algolia keys have this predictable pattern, then they can enroll in secret scanning. If they don't then they probably can't

English is not formal logic.

In formal logic, that statement is true whether X is GitHub, or Lockheed-Martin, Safeway, or the local hardware store.

In English, the statement serves to inform (or remind) you that GitHub has a secret scanning program that many providers actually do partner with.

Yes, and in the real world where Grice's Maxim of Relevance is in force, then when the secrets issuer that is the subject of the discussion isn't one of those partners, then an informative "reminder" that GitHub "has a secret scanning program" with a bunch of other partners is not actually informative. It's as superfluous and unhelpful as calling to let someone know you're not interested in the item they've posted for sale on Craiglist (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWG3jKzKcm8>).

How is reminding people that they can safely revoke exposed API keys not informative? Why are you being so combative?

Because "This has to be one of the dumbest, most reckless threads to have been posted (and so vociferously defended) on HN."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47419913

It's more useful than telling someone that their statement is a tautology in formal logic.

No it's not.

Yes it is. Reminding somebody of this feature is useful to somebody, even if it's not completely relevant to the topic being discussed. Calling out a supposed tautology is the opposite of useful: it helps nobody and just clutters things up.

> Reminding somebody of this feature is useful to somebody, even if it's not completely relevant to the topic being discussed.

Yeah, it's especially useful in that case. Useful to attackers, because someone "helpfully" showed up with "reminder" that reads like a suggestion to post these specific secrets (or any other Algolia secrets that other HNers might have come across) in the open out of some misguided belief that doing so will invalidate them.

This has to be one of the dumbest, most reckless threads to have been posted (and so vociferously defended) on HN.

I have been developing an OpenClaw-like agent that automates exactly this type of attack.

Why? This is just regex search and there are plenty of tools that do this perfectly fine.

None of those proven tools would make a man feel like a wannabe Mr. Robot.

Have to agree with _pdp_ on this one. I just don't see the need for an LLM agent to do a recursive grep for API keys in public repos.

Not saying people shouldn't build these tools, but the use case is lost on me.

It feels like the industry is in this weird phase of trying to replace 30-year-old, perfectly optimized shell utilities with multi-shot agent workflows that literally cost money to run. A basic Python script with a regex matcher and the GitHub API will find these keys faster, cheaper, and more reliably.

because the poster works for Accenture.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/acc...

Interesting how many people already are playing with these API keys ? ;)

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