Secrets Exposed: How Secret Scanning Protects Your Confidential Data

GitHub Advanced Security feature has enabled a secret scanning feature for their GitHub Enterprise account. It is enabled by default for all public repositories. GitHub comprehensively scans the repository throughout its history and issues a report if it detects a secret. GitHub has a large number of scanning partners, more than a hundred, to detect a set of expressions in a repository. According to a Harvard Business Review article, Secret scanning refers to the process of actively and automatically searching for, detecting, and identifying sensitive information, such as passwords, API keys, credentials, and other forms of confidential or proprietary data. The secret scanning partner, in our case, is AlphaSecrets. If a secret is caught in a scan, GitHub will notify the owner and the vendor that is scanning alongside. Now, if a secret is detected, the vendor, i.e., AlphaSecrets, will decide, depending on the repository, if public or not to revoke the secret immediately.  

To understand the strength of this feature, you should regularly post your access tokens to GitHub, and secrets will provide quick and efficient results. It elaborates on the background processes and whether someone has tried to change something. Scanning helps you protect against possible intrusions into your public repository. You are the owner of the repository, so it affects you directly.   

AlphaSecret alerts also make it easy to track the endpoints across all alerts. That way, you can look deeper into the leak’s source and audit against the intruder actions taken.  

Main Features of AlphaSecrets 

Alerts 

Alerts are available for all the codes and data present in a repository. When AlphaSecrets detects a new secret, GitHub Enterprise Cloud warns all users with access to the repository security notifications based on their selected settings. You will receive email notifications if you monitor a repository as an owner; I suggest you enable security alerts for repository activity or are the owner of the commits containing perceived secrets.  

External Protection 

The secret scanning feature of GitHub allows you to have push protection to stop developers external to your business from pushing supported secrets to your repositories or organization. 

With push protection on, the system checks for pushes of trusted secrets after every update. It lists the secrets discovered while scanning, allowing owners to view, delete, or specify permission to push them as needed. 

Prevention Remedies 

AlphaSecret returns results containing sensitive information only available to the necessary teams and the owner. You can impose a security boundary by assigning roles to teams and members within your organization. Even for a small group of predefined roles, giving multiple individuals the same position in various repositories can take much time and effort.  

Therefore, GitHub offers the security manager role, which can assist you in managing a team and repost side by side. Any team member assigned this role has read access to every repository in the organization and management permissions to admit and configure security alerts. 

AlphaSecrets 

After analyzing Github and other Open Source software, we at Auxin have manufactured AlphaSecrets. A software best suited for your cloud security and different security needs. The following criterion summarizes why we are the best at the game. 

We combine application and surface scanning for a complete 360 view of your application. A significant edge that Auxin has over our competitors is that we automate the SDLC entirely. To minimize the challenges mentioned above, AUXIN allows vendor and consultant mode. This will enable stakeholders and company developers to have shared access to the tool so their concerns regarding privacy and confidentiality get resolved. We try out best to minimize false positives as much as we can and provide industry-specific scan and test results. AlphaSecrets allows applications to scale more significantly without lowering their security. For more knowledge, read our blogs on our website Auxin.io.