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by jopsen 1275 days ago
> Or is that nonsense?

Yes, that is nonsense.

1) secret scanning can be disabled (not even sure it's enabled by default). 2) the regexes are fairly specific, length limited, etc. 3) github is obviously reviewing regexes that are accepted.

Check the list of stuff supported: https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/sec...

A bit sad, they don't publish the list of regexes, etc.

--------------

I added a similar thing to the package manager for Dart / Flutter, because we saw users accidentally publishing secrets. That code is public, it relies on regexes and entropy estimation:

https://github.com/dart-lang/pub/blob/eb8ee21a089ebe0f2c2dd8...

It was heavily inspired by the researchers in: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/nd...

Worth a read, and certainly provides motivation for Github to do this kind of work :D

(disclosure: I work for Google. The opinions stated here are my own)

1 comments

Once again[1][2], scanning alerts on private repos are only sent to owners. Whereas public repos are, you know, public.

It's really tiring that people correct other people's misinformation when they themselves haven't read the bold bullets points in "Learn more about secret scanning"[3] and end up totally missing the point.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34067335

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34067625

[3] https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/abo...

Ah yeah, that's a good point.

Honestly, I'm just very happy GitHub is doing this, because we've all made these mistakes. And it's so easy for then to hide in git revision history. Only the be found when someone scans for the secrets.