One does not commit or compile credentials
Context:
This meme was brought to you by the PyPI Director of Infrastructure who accidentally hardcoded credentials - which could have resulted in compromissing the entire core Python ecosystem.
Well from my personal PoV there are a few problems with that
- You can’t detect all credentials reliably, they could be encoded in base64 for example
- I think it’s kind of okay to commit credentials and configuration used for the local dev environment (and ONLY the local one). E.g. when you require some infrastructure like a database inside a container for your app. Not every dev wants to manually set a few dozen configuration entries when they quickly want to checkout and run the app
I think it’s kind of okay to commit credentials and configuration used for the local dev environment (and ONLY the local one).
No. Never.
E.g. when you require some infrastructure like a database inside a container for your app. Not every dev wants to manually set a few dozen configuration entries when they quickly want to checkout and run the app
In this situation, it would be better to write a simple script that can generate fresh and unique values for the dev.
Laziness is not an excuse.
You can’t detect all credentials reliably,
Easy. You check in the password file first. Then you can check if the codebase contains any entry on the blacklist.
Wait…
You were so close! The right solution is of course training an AI model that detects credentials and rejects commits that contain them!
You joke, but GitHub advanced security does this and more. On top of the AI component, they check the hash of all things that look like an api key and then also check them against their integrated vendors to see if they’re non-expired. I don’t know how well it works, but they claim like a .1% false positive rate or something like that.
