GitGuardian, the software supply chain security platform, has unveiled ‘HasMySecretLeaked,’ a free toolset to help security engineers proactively verify if their organisation’s secrets have leaked on GitHub.com.

Securing secrets is a daunting task in the cloud-native application development world, GitGuardian states. Organisations grapple with secrets sprawl, where API keys and database credentials proliferate across developer tools.

Furthermore, secrets are susceptible to leaks during "out of office hours," often in assets beyond an organisation's control, namely personal GitHub repositories, Docker images, or open-source packages.

In response, GitGuardian presents 'HasMySecretLeaked,' a private database with over 20 million records of hashed secrets leaked in public sources, including GitHub.com. Users can query the database by submitting a hashed version of their secret in the search console, and GitGuardian will look for their perfect matches–without revealing any other secrets or their locations.

“Knowing whether your ‘vaulted’ secrets have leaked publicly is just one API call away. We built a privacy-safe and secure process that returns an unequivocal answer to the crucial question: Has my secret leaked?” says Eric Fourrier, co-founder and CEO of GitGuardian.

Since 2017, GitGuardian has assisted application security, platform engineering, and development teams in reducing their organisations’ attack surface by remediating exposed secrets. With ‘HasMySecretLeaked’, however, GitGuardian is elevating secrets security in new ways, bringing systematic leak checks to every secret in the DevOps pipeline, the company states.

Also, starting today, GitGuardian users can harness the power of 'HasMySecretLeaked' directly from the command-line interface ggshield. In addition, ggshield includes plug-ins for pulling secrets from popular tools like HashiCorp Vault and AWS Secrets Manager and staging them in local environments before leak inspection.

The capability is also already integrated into the GitGuardian Platform. It will notify security teams if their hardcoded secrets, found in organisation-owned repositories, Slack workspaces, or Jira projects, are unintentionally leaked to public sources the organisation cannot control or see.

“It’s more than just visibility. Undetected public exposure makes all the difference between a simple alert and a critical incident. It’s the context security teams badly need to prioritise remediation,” comments Edouard Viot, Vice President of Product at GitGuardian.

GitGuardian scans every public commit on GitHub for leaks, spanning API keys, database assignments, and developer secrets. In 2020, it uncovered 3 million exposed secrets, surging to 6 million in 2021 and an astounding 10 million in 2022. GitGuardian’s monitoring capabilities position ‘HasMySecretLeaked’ as a one-of-a-kind solution for organisations seeking to audit the security of their secrets.

GitGuardian also understands the importance of protecting secrets from unwanted exposure and has designed HasMySecretLeaked in a way that does not read or access users’ secrets.

“We’re leveraging concepts such as k-anonymity and zero-knowledge, making it impossible for us or anyone else to see or reconstruct the secrets, all while determining whether they have leaked in public sources,” concludes Fourrier.