[Xylakant]

On an internal VCS this may be a deliberate decision: Secrets need to be stored somewhere and a cost-risk analysis can result in "this is the best place that we currently have at our disposal". That obviously won't fly if your threat model includes "adversary may attack our github account from within GH" or if you ever plan on opening up that repo, but if neither applies this may be the best place to store some sorts of secrets.

[Klathmon]

I've gone through the process of open-sourcing previously closed codebases, and in virtually all of them a decision is made to make a single "genesis" commit to start the public exposure because there's just not enough manpower (or I don't know git well enough) to go through and ensure there not only aren't any secrets now (meaning passwords, or info the company doesn't want to release), but also there weren't at any point in the past.

[Vinkekatten]

Genesis commit, that's a catchy name for it. We've done the same thing, after some discussion this always ends up making the most sense.

Also, you can hide your crimes and not show off all your "TODO: put more stuff here" commits to the world.

[raesene6]

Sure there's always a cost / benefit balance to take into account.

That said I'd say putting secrets in a git repo is a pretty risky thing to do. By the nature of the tool that means that the secret ends up on the device(s) of every developer who checks out the codebase, so the security of the secrets is equal to the security of the worst secured device in question.

[Xylakant]

> That said I'd say putting secrets in a git repo is a pretty risky thing to do

Storing and keeping secrets is a pretty risky thing in general. Think: small team, small app, everybody has the secrets anyways for deployment purposes. Sure, setting up vault is superior - but how much effort does that cost that could be invested in a better solution. Or a puppet repo that you use to provision your machines, shared in the ops team: small team, everbody has root - on each machine there might be an ssh key that gives away all your secrets. So better invest in solid FDE and maybe tie that to a TF device, a yubikey that is required to decrypt the disk etc. Not perfect by all means, but there's limited time to go around and you really should think about what threats you want/can defend against. (for example, for most projects, I'm not wasting any thought about defenses against a nation state actor, that's a threat that I won't be able to meaningfully counter anyways).

[raesene6]

FDE's and Yubikeys are nice and good controls for some classes of risk, but distributing your passwords onto dev laptops via a git repo. opens you up to a wide range of risks that those won't help you with.

Unless you got super-corporate lockdown with the end point devices you have risks like "A user with access to the repo. installs software which turns out to be malware", "A user with access to the repo. leaves their laptop in a coffee shop unlocked", "A user with access to the repo. puts it on a USB key and loses the key". None of these are nation state level concerns, they're things that could impact the project purely by accident, or at the hands of low-skill attackers

The point is once you've allowed secrets to be in a distributed system like this you have very little control over what happens to them, which is why I'd recommend using a secrets management system where there's more control (e.g. vault from hashicorp) in almost all circumstances.

[jameshart]

Also, there's a surprising number of websites out there with a .git directory in the root...