Committing passwords, SSH keys and API keys to your code repositories is quite common. This doesn’t make it less dangerous. Yes, if you are ‘moving fast and breaking things’, it is sometimes easier to take shortcuts to simplify development and testing. But these broken things will eventually have to be fixed, as security of your product and perhaps even company, is at risk. Fixing things later in the development cycle is likely be more complicated and costly.
I’m not trying to scaremonger, there are already plenty of news articles about data breaches wiping out value for companies. My point is merely about the fact that it is much easier to address things early in the development, rather than waiting for a pentest or, worse still, a malicious attacker to discover these vulnerabilities.
Disciplined engineering and teaching your staff secure software development are certainly great ways to tackle this. There has to, however, be a fallback mechanism to detect (and prevent) mistakes. Thankfully, there are a number of open-source tools that can help you with that:
You will have to assess your own environment to pick the right tool that suits your organisation best.
If you read my previous blogs on integrating application testing and detecting vulnerable dependencies, you know I’m a big fan of embedding such tests in your Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. This provides instant feedback to your development team and minimises the window between discovering and fixing a vulnerability. If done right, the weakness (a secret in the code repository in this case) will not even reach the production environment, as it will be caught before the code is committed. An example is on the screenshot at the top of the page.
For this reason (and a few others), the tool that I particularly like is detect-secrets, developed in Python and kindly open-sourced by Yelp. They describe the reasons for building it and explain the architecture in their blog. It’s lightweight, language agnostic and integrates well in the development workflow. It relies on pre-commit hooks and will not scan the whole repository – only the chunk of code you are committing.
Yelp’s detect-secrets, however, has its limitations. It needs to be installed locally by engineers which might be tricky with different operating systems. If you do want to use it but don’t want to be restricted by local installation, it can also run out of a container, which can be quite handy.
Cyber Security Leadership 
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