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tonywebster | 10 years ago

Don't be so quick to dismiss this one. This is notable for several reasons, including (1) it wasn't his mistake, but rather that of a Visual Studio bug not following his instructions to make a private repo on GitHub; (2) the speed in which this happened (minutes), and (3) it has useful analysis into some sorely lacking functionality in AWS that lets this continue to happen.

discuss

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nathancahill|10 years ago

I don't know. Even for private repos, it's bad practice to commit private keys to source control.

zeveb|10 years ago

> Even for private repos, it's bad practice to commit private keys to source control.

Is it, though? Committing them to the same repository as one's code lives in, sure, but committing them to a separate production-deploy repo seems okay to me (although I'd much prefer that private repo never to hit a centralised service like GitHub).

cptnbob|10 years ago

AWS SDK for .Net supports named profiles for VS so your source check in only contains a profile name. If you hard coded your IAM or account keys or stuck them in the app.config you're simply doing it wrong. There is no excuse. It's all here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSdkDocsNET/latest/V3/Developer...

Also if you use a proper IAM profile locked down to specific resources then you wouldn't expose your entire account. The author stated he didn't use EC2 so why wasn't the key/secret pair an IAM account with a policy set for minimal access?

What I'd worry more about is that the VS bug exposed private source code, data and proprietary intellectual property.

We use github and I worry every day someone will public fork one of our repos by accident. That would be a grave fuck up but it's waiting to happen. We should have stuck with centrally controlled active-directory integrated SVN from a security perspective (even if it is a pain in the ass).

gregmac|10 years ago

Well, it is partially his mistake, which he acknowledges:

> I am certainly not innocent here and some mistakes were made on my part. [...] To this end, having encrypted access keys or excluding configuration settings from GitHub would have prevented the AWS charges - and this is certainly the approach I would take from now on.

morder|10 years ago

In this case it wasn't Visual studio but an extension created by Github that caused the problem.