Tell HN: Github has dozens of public s3 passwords

[kabuks]

I almost pushed my s3 credentials to a public github repo for the third time in one day.

So, I got curious. Are there people out there who forget cover their tracks?

A quick search shows quite a few 'open' buckets out there. What's the best way to warn these folks? What other credentials are lurking out there?

Here's the search: http://github.com/search?langOverride=&language=&q=S3+Base.establish_connection&repo=&start_value=1&type=Code&x=0&y=0

And the first open bucket I found: http://github.com/prakashraman/jammmin/blob/a668672c69fafdb8317fec4fb19b7abb0b318e1a/app/scripts/s3_connect.rb

[jah]

In case anyone else made this mistake, Github's help section has an article describing the steps needed to remove sensitive data from a git repo:

http://help.github.com/removing-sensitive-data/

[DavidSJ]

In this case rotating your S3 creds is probably the optimal solution.

[relix]

It's something that almost happened to me too. A git repository for a project that at first, in the prototype-stage, had credentials hard-coded, but inevitably moved on to be config-file-driven.

I concocted the following command to change all mentions of a specific word to another word, in a git repository:

  git filter-branch --tree-filter "find . -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/originalpassword/newpassword/g' {} \;"

Use this to check if there are any mentions of some word, e.g. your password, in the repository:

  git filter-branch --tree-filter "grep -r originalpassword * || true"

[ritonlajoie]

" What's the best way to warn these folks? What other credentials are lurking out there?"

Sure, posting that on HN is a good way...

[pierrefar]

How about leaving them some README-NOW.txt file in their S3 bucket?

[prakashraman]

My God, I can't believe I left it there. While I was developing a while ago I had put it there and completely forgot to remove it. What a costly mistake this could've been or even is.

Thank you, kabuks, so much for noticing this. I have changed my S3 key pair and am getting to cleaning up my git commits.

My God ! But thanks so much.

[milkshakes]

why don't you just email github? i'll bet they have a way to contact their users

[mrduncan]

http://support.github.com/discussion/new

Don't forget to make it a private discussion.

[roder]

What I have done to prevent that is to use the OS's environment variables:

http://github.com/roder/riakaws/blob/master/clouds.rb#L10

[pskomoroch]

There is a "message" button on each github user page.

I just sent this to a few people (including someone who had forked one of my projects and added their S3 keys to a config file):

Noticed you have your Amazon S3 keys out in the open on github. You might want to remove those config files from your repository as described in the thread here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1574211

-Pete

[gojomo]

Remove and change at Amazon, as the values could still be floating around in fetches, caches, archives, indexes, etc. for a while.

[tlrobinson]

Might be worth setting up a git hook to scan your commits for sensitive data.

Of course you'll need to include that sensitive data in the script, though the first few characters of AWS credentials should be unique enough.

I thought about setting up something similar for networking. If a packet contains my password in cleartext then pop up a warning allowing/denying (denying would have to force the connect to close, I guess). Might be too much overhead though.

[ck2]

Protip: keep settings in a separate file

Mark the file as excluded from svn/git.

Make a settings.sample file for the project.

[baxter]

Rather than store passwords or sensitive config data in a file I'll usually try to store them in an environment variable. Heroku has a little guide on this: http://docs.heroku.com/config-vars

[trevorturk]

I use a similar strategy: http://trevorturk.com/2009/06/25/config-vars-and-heroku/

...this kind of thing doesn't have to be Heroku-specific, though.

[jbeda]

There is a business opportunity here. Managing credentials and secrets is (passwords, private certs, etc) is hard. Making that process turnkey, secure and easy would be useful.

[thenduks]

I'm not sure it's that hard.

You can use any number of very low-barrier strategies to solve this. One that was mentioned a few times in this thread is to use environment variables. Personally I just put a {whatever}.yml or similar in my project tree somewhere and throw it in .gitignore.

I can't imagine a process that starts with "go to westorecredentials.com and sign up..." being any easier. Willing to be surprised :)

[kabuks]

A more precise search http://github.com/search?langOverride=&language=yaml&...

[jeebusroxors]

How about something with github API? I'm pretty sure you can search/email?

[igorgue]

Yeah, this is a typical mistake, I've pushed Django's secret keys and even twitter credentials.

PS: I do it all the time on my private repos but I try to not do it on the public ones.

[ulf]

In case of django there is a nice workaround in using a non-git localsettings.py file.

Just put "from localsettings import *" in your settings-file, and keep all deployment-specific settings in the localsettings-file

[adrianscott]

good reminder to us all, thanks Kabuks