Github Kills Search After Hundreds of Private Keys Exposed

mask.of.sanity writes "Github has killed its search function to safeguard users who were caught out storing keys and passwords in public repositories. 'Users found that quite a large number of users who had added private keys to their repositories and then pushed the files up to GitHub. Searching on id_rsa, a file which contains the private key for SSH logins, returned over 600 results. Projects had live configuration files from cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Azure with the encryption keys still included. Configuration and private key files are intended to be kept secret, since if it falls into wrong hands, that person can impersonate the user (or at least, the user's machine) and easily connect to that remote machine.' Search links popped up throughout Twitter pointing to stored keys, including what was reportedly account credentials for the Google Chrome source code repository. The keys can still be found using search engines, so check your repos."

Comments

At least...

[Anonymous Coward]

they've been seen by 'many eye balls'.

That's good right?

Re:At least...

[ArsenneLupin]

But on the other hand, you certainly wouldn't object to any gals exposing their pubic "locks"...

Re:This is why developers are not sysadmins

[Anonymous Coward]

No. This is actually completely absurd. A developer that cannot grasp the concept that private keys have to be kept private, cannot be trusted to do anything but screw up the most basic security provisions when writing code.

They should get a kick in the ass, such as three months without any sort of commit privileges, and mandatory code review for an year. THAT should be enough to make it stick, and impress on them the real gravity of their failure. Otherwise, they will just chalk it up as "an annoyance done by those uninteresting people who should learn to code before they go pestering code-gods".

Search engines

[ArsenneLupin]

On google, the following search string still turns up a goldmine...:

site:github.com inurl:id_dsa

Idiots...

Re:Search engines

[robmv]

Stop, Google will shutdown search because of that

Re:Search engines

[tlhIngan]

Heck, Google disabled searching number ranges after some enterprising folks used them to harvest credit card numbers - doing searches for numbers between 4000000000000000 and 5999999999999999 which will get back lists of credit cards (Visa/MC) that Google indexed because someone put the list up.

I just saw this, sort of

[slashmydots]

I was cruising ebay yesterday and saw that one of the laptops had their windows license keys exposed in pictures in a readable format. I poked around some more and found that isn't terribly uncommon. Some people just don't think no matter what website it is.

Re:Deserving

[GameboyRMH]

Exactly, GitHub shouldn't disable a site feature to protect the stupid.

Re:This is why developers are not sysadmins

[h4rr4r]

Sysadmins should also know how to code. Nothing better than showing them their screwup and the solution to it.

Plus, since all sysadmins, real ones anyway, are already competent in several scripting languages it is not that hard a skill to add if all you need to do is be better than bottom of the barrel programmers.

Re:This is why developers are not sysadmins

[ArsenneLupin]

In some of these instances, all of ~/.ssh/ did actually end up in the project directory. Or maybe they used their entire home directory as the project root? Stoopid, stoopid people.

(Yes, there is also a nice ~/.ssh/config file, so that you also know which locks those key fits...)

Nothing has changed...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Back in the days when I was the root (of all evil according my fellow grad students) of our lab, one of the constant problems was people blindly doing chmod 777 .* on the $home. They have .emacs or .profile or .cshrc that was customized ages ago by some grad student, and they want to share it with a new student. Somehow they stumbled on to "chmod 777 .*" as a solution to all their file sharing problems. Now this "magic command" was also being blindly passed around without worrying about security implications. Oh, yeah, they think they are clever and tape the login credentials to the underside of the keyboard and laugh at secretaries who tape it to their monitors.

Looks like these grad students have all growned up and uploading it all to the cloud.

Re:Nothing has changed...

[WankersRevenge]

Yeah ... I was "that guy". The first time I installed Linux in 2000, I was annoyed that I needed "permission" to write to a directory outside of my home directory. I was coming from a Windows world, after all.

I solved this "problem" by chmod 777 the entire filesystem. Hah. Problem solved. Needless to say, I couldn't start the machine back up again. I'm guessing it killed itself from the shear embarrassment. After that, I decided it may be in my best interest to read the manual.

I'll do that one of these days :)

A big mess to clean up

[NightHwk1]

git rm id_rsa*; git commit -a -m "problem solved\!"

Not quite. They're already out there. The keys are still in the revision history. People have forked and cloned it.

Hopefully the developers who created these keys know that besides removing them from the repo, the keys can no longer be used. They must be removed from every .ssh/authorized_keys file, every service like Github that uses them for deploying code, etc.