[rangibaby]

Is there a disadvantage to banning private keys in public repos?

[Artemis2]

I personally upload private keys in repos for some test scenarios and examples (dummy private keys of course). I often don’t want to write a test harness to generate the data for each run. Sue me!

[demarq]

Yes, business wise github is a git hosting site. If they started implementing rules on how you structure your application customers would get frustrated and move away.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting a ban at all, just a friendly email in response to commits that introduce credentials to public repos

[jcranmer]

People already mentioned the major use case of testing, but building a blacklist of keys (e.g., the Debian OpenSSL there-are-only-64K-keys fiasco) is a plausible option as well.

[tyingq]

A fair amount of the google hits are for test certs that allow the test suite for the software to run.

[kemitche]

Test keys, example keys for documentation, etc.

I'd be all for an optional, branch protection-like feature though.

[rwmj]

Is there a problem generating them? It's essentially just a single ‘ssh-keygen’ command, see eg:

https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/p2v/Mak...

[ATsch]

Well, misdetection and examples for one.