I scanned all of GitHub's "oops commits" for leaked secrets
95 comments
·July 3, 2025Pwhy1
mike_hearn
Where is that linked from? I've been using GitHub for years and never heard of this page.
amiga386
Between "Readme" and "0 stars" on https://github.com/SharonBrizinov/test-oops-commit/
Looking at some of my projects, it's entirely empty, or only has a few items, so I suspect it was introduced "recently" and doesn't have data from before then.
Picking https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/activity?sort=ASC as a busy example, Activity page has no data prior to 7th March 2023. So it has existed for 2 of GitHub's 17 years of existence.
mike_hearn
Thank you. I think that section has consisted of links to READMEs and stuff for so long I just stopped paying attention to it.
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3abiton
Funny thing, we had a similar issue with one of our deployement in the past. It's similar to leaking accidently your password into bash history. Happens more than it should.
emmelaich
I guess it's possible to delete these forever as by deleting the entire repo and re uploading. As long as there are no forks.
oefrha
> GitHub keeps these dangling commits, from what we can tell, forever.
Not if you contact customer support and ask them to garbage collect your repo.
What I do when I accidentally push something I don’t want public:
- Force push;
- Immediately rotate if it’s something like a secret key;
- Contact customer support to gc the repo (and verify the commit is gone afterwards).
(Of course you should consider the damage done the moment you pushed it. The above steps are meant to minimize potential further damage.)
whyever
If you rotated the secret, why do anything else? I don't think there is any potential further damage (except maybe reputational).
oefrha
1. Not all secrets can be rotated. E.g. I can't just "rotate" my home address, which I prefer to be private.
2. Even for rotatable secrets, "I don't think there is any potential further damage" rests on the assumption that the secret is 100% invalidated everywhere. What if there are obscure and/or neglected systems, possibly outside of your control, that still accept that secret? No system is bug-free. If I can take steps to minimize access to an invalidated secret, I will.
jofzar
> 1. Not all secrets can be rotated. E.g. I can't just "rotate" my home address, which I prefer to be private.
Reporter can sell their current house and move to another home as a workaround
Closing ticket as workaround provided.
matsemann
Also avoids false positives in the future from automated scanners, bounty hunters etc. if you clean up now.
chickenzzzzu
Anyone who puts weight on digging through a project to see if they've ever leaked a secret is guilty of encouraging an antipattern-- the guaranteed outcome is you'll have an organization petrified of shipping anything, in case someone interprets it as bad or a security risk, etc.
mk89
You can see it that way, however, there are automated tools to scan for secrets. Even github does it. In my opinion, this educates the developers to be more careful and slightly more security oriented, rather than afraid of shipping code.
I would also like to remind that a leaked AWS secret can cost 100Ks of $ to an organization. And AWS won't help you there.
It can literally break your company and get people unemployed, depending on the secret/saas.
cedws
Git doesn’t clone those orphaned refs though right?
bob1029
I got tired of "oops" over time and started abusing environment variables. If you have enough discipline to spend 10 seconds configuring them, you'll never have to worry about magic strings accidentally getting sucked up into source control.
The other upside with environment variables is that they work across projects. Set & forget, assuming you memorized the name. Getting at tokens for OpenAI, AWS, GH, etc., is already a solved problem on my machine.
I understand why a lot of developers don't do this though. Especially on Windows, it takes a somewhat unpleasant # of clicks to get to the UI that manages these things. It's so much faster (relatively speaking) to paste the secret into your code. This kind of trivial laziness can really stack up on you if you aren't careful.
UnreachableCode
What I've never understood is, how is this an issue with private repos? Aside from open source projects I can't see the problem with accidentally doing this, even though it is a smell.
Thorrez
Different employees in the company have different permissions. If an employee with a lot of access commits a secret, then employees who shouldn't have that much access can take the secret and use it.
froobius
It's a bad idea...
- commit secret in currently private repo
- 3 years later share / make public
- forget the secret is in the commit history, and still valid, (and relatedly, having long-lived secrets is less secure)
Sure that might not happen for you, but the chances increase dramatically if you make a habit of commiting secrets.
dspillett
Anything that makes the repo less private later (deliberate public release, hack (not just if the repo bit of anything that can connect to it), etc) means the secret is now in the open.
Always cycle credentials after an accident like committing them to source control. Do it immediately, you will forget later. Even if you are 100% sure the repo will never be more public, it is a good habit to form.
lqet
Many years ago at my first job after university, I accidentally committed a private key into our internal Git repository. We removed it, because we could not completely rule out the possibility that this repository would be made public to a customer, or to the world, in the future. I think we used filter-repo to get the key out of everywhere.
cess11
It's called private but actually shared with a very large corporation you don't control, likely running on infrastructure they don't control. Due to the CLOUD Act it's also shared with the US government.
Cthulhu_
Exactly; you should fully expect the NSA to have a copy of these logs as well. It can be very valuable to have secret keys from companies in adversarial countries (including your own).
Example, there's an ICE reporting app now where people can anonymously report ICE sightings... but how anonymous is it really? Users report a location, that can be cross-referenced with location histories and quicky led back to an individual. There may be retaliation to users of this app if the spiral into authoritarianism in the US continues.
cess11
Right, so, some activists and freedom fighters have been doing stuff in environments they know to be hostile for a long time, while the US has just started growing some movements like that after a hiatus from sometime in the seventies and eighties until somewhat recently.
For now they're going to be making a lot of basic mistakes but eventually they'll grugq up and learn from people that are already used to dealing with the violence of their government.
bapak
Secrets gotta live somewhere. Are you supplying them every time you deploy or run CI?
larntz
Yes. Either via a secret manager (eg vault) or configured as repo secrets if that kind of infra isn't available.
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/security-for-gith...
Never commit secrets for any reason.
cess11
I'm not telling you what you should or should not do, especially not in the abstract. I commented on the deceptive terminology employed by a very large corporation with deep connections to rather distasteful activities and organisations.
edverma2
All devs should run open-source trufflehog as a precommit hook for all repositories on their local system. It’s not a foolproof solution, but it’s a small time investment to get set up and gives me reasonable assurance that I will not accidentally commit a secret. I’m unsure why this is not more widely considered standard practice.
ramon156
If I'm honest, I don't know how much this happens at work, and even if it does it's not the end of the world. Just scratch the commit from existence.
In my head, the people who accidentally share secrets are also the people who couldn't setup trufflehog with a precommit.
Arainach
This isn't true in practice. Even among well educated high performing professionals, mistakes happen. Checklists save lives - in medicine, in aircraft maintenance, in all fields.
People who believe they know what they're doing get overconfident, move fast, and make mistakes. Seasoned woodworkers lose fingers. Experienced doctors lose patients to preventable mistakes. Senior developers wipe the prod database or make a commit they shouldn't.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/fall08checklist/
>In a study of 100 Michigan hospitals, he found that, 30 percent of the time, surgical teams skipped one of these five essential steps: washing hands; cleaning the site; draping the patient; donning surgical hat, gloves, and gown; and applying a sterile dressing. But after 15 months of using Pronovost’s simple checklist, the hospitals “cut their infection rate from 4 percent of cases to zero, saving 1,500 lives and nearly $200 million,”
xlii
Aye.
I made shameful mistake of submitting private key (development one so harmless) only because it wasn’t gitignored and prehook script crashed without deleting it). More of a political/audit problem than a real one.
I guess I’m old enough to remember Murphy Laws and the one saying "safety system upon failure will bring protected system down first".
IshKebab
It's crazy how many people don't know this, despite it being fairly obvious.
I guess it's hubris. I don't make stupid mistakes. You see it a lot in discussions around Rust.
oreilles
> Just scratch the commit from existence.
Unfortunately, that is impossible: https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/anyone-can-access-deleted-a...
Cthulhu_
Pre-commit hooks are client-side only and opt-in; I've always been a big proponent of pre-commit hooks, as the sooner you find an issue the cheaper it is to fix, but over time pre-commit hooks that e.g. run unit tests tend to take longer and longer, and some people want to do rapid-fire commits instead of being a bit more thoughtful about it.
bapak
pre-commits require discipline:
- enforce them on CI too; not useful for secrets but at least you're eventually alerted
- do not run tasks that take more than a second; I do not want my commit commands to not be instant.
- do not prevent bad code from being committed, just enforce formatting; running tests on pre-commit is ridiculous, imagine Word stopping you from saving a file until you fixed all your misspellings.
ali_piccioni
I moved all my precommit hooks to prepush hooks. I don’t need a spellchecker disrupting my headspace when I’m deep into a problem.
My developer environments are setup to reproduce CI test locally, but if I need to resort to “CI driven development” I can bypass prepush hooks with —-no-verify.
emmelaich
One good (and obviously bad) thing about Subversion was the ability to change history. As admin I was asked numerous times to change a commit message. To point to the correct Jira issue, for instance.
Also easier to enforce pre-commit, since it was done server side.
Prickle
I am guilty of this one. I was 30 minutes from a presentation, and couldn't figure out why my code couldn't get the key from the hosting service.
So I just hard coded the key. The key was rotated after the presentation.
Does not look very good on a repo.
ggm
Maybe a default secure delete option could be made a lower bar event?
Checkout to event, commit in clean state with prior log history, overlay the state after the elision and replace git repo?
When I had to retain log and elide state I did things like this in RCS. Getting date/time info right was tricky.
Sayrus
If you push a secret publicly, you should consider it leaked. On GitHub, you have 5 minutes on a non-watched repository (due to the delay) and less than 30 seconds on a watched repository to revoke it before it's been cloned and archived by a third-party. Whether that party is malicious or not, rewriting the Git history will not change anything that the secret is leaked. And you can already rewrite the Git History and garbage collect commits that aren't part of the tree anymore on most providers.
ggm
Yes I can see my off-line experience doesn't apply. Thanks.
volemo
If something got out to the internet, you won't get it back. There is little point in rewriting repo history if you have already made a secret public. Just change the secret as soon as you can.
gghffguhvc
The person who leaked it and the person/team that can rotate it might be in different silos or timezones etc. Rewriting the history is prudent but not sufficient.
orthoxerox
That's why key revocation, like credit card blocking, should be a separate service that is available 24x7. Like, if you know the value of an AWS token, this should be sufficient data for you to call an AWS API that revokes it.
jbverschoor
Yet people complain that Netflix/Youtube pull certain content ;)
tobyhinloopen
Yes, because paying customers will have the content removed but it will continue to be available for pirates.
tobyhinloopen
Anything pushed is to be considered leaked. You might as well leave the commit in and invalidate the secret.
alkonaut
So the question is: after I orphaned a commit how do I _truly_ make sure it's not visible anywhere on github? Is there no way short of contacting customer support to GC a repo? Shouldn't this just basically be a button on the repo, in the "danger zone" area of the repo maintenance?
abhisek
The thing that people miss out is Git is really a content addressed storage. This means all commits, even the ones not linked to any refs are still stored and addressable.
p.s: If you run OSS project, please use Github Advanced Security and enable Push Protection against secrets.
exceptione
Are you talking about the local branch and the local reflog?
I thought garbage collection should get rid of all dangling stuff. But even without that, I am curious if pushing a branch would push the dangling commits as well.
raesene9
An interesting look at one of the consequences of using git and public repo's.
Does leave me wondering how long before someone has a setup which detects and tries to exploit these in real-time, which feels like it could be nasty.
Also a challenge with these posts is they were unlikely to have been able to contact all the affected developers who have got exposed secrets, meaning that any that were uncontactable/non-responsive are likely still vulnerable now, I'd guess that means they're about see what happens if those secrets get abused, as people start exploring this more...
matsemann
There are hundred of setups like that already. If you push an AWS key or similar publicly you may have a bitcoin miner or botnet running on your cloud in matter of minutes.
raesene9
The point here being the blog is about looking for oops commits to spot keys that would otherwise not necessarily be picked up automatically...
hboon
There are already people scanning git repos for Bitcoin/Ethereum/crypto keys and exploiting them immediately.
raesene9
There's a lot of secret classes that aren't necessarily automatically scanned for. The Oops commit is a good signal that something shouldn't have been committed, even if automated scanners don't get it.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Not just Git either. Push a container to Docker Hub and you'll get instant downloads. Presumably people scanning containers for secrets.
john2go3
Unfortunately for those of us without a Google account, it seems one is required to download the mentioned SQLite database (force_push_commits.sqlite3.)
gen6acd60af
Concerning.
It's interesting research, but will Truffle Security use the email addresses for lead gen or marketing purposes, like how they mined users' pingbacks from their XSS Hunter fork for stats?
https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/new-xss-hunter-host-truff...
diogolsq
One more reason to activate key rotation.
Maybe I missed it but the article doesn't mention the even easier way to see this: the activity tab.
It has everything. Any force push to hide ugly prototype code is kept forever which annoys me. I wish we were able to remove stuff from there but the only way to do it is to email support it seems?
Here it is for the test repo mentioned
https://github.com/SharonBrizinov/test-oops-commit/activity