We are excited to announce a webinar coming up about GitHub’s Secret Scanning functionality. Secret scanning is designed to help secure your codebase and prevent accidental leakage of sensitive credentials like login credentials, access keys, and tokens that are often precursors to larger security breaches.
Secret sprawl is an increasing problem for software development teams around the world. One of the best ways to ensure your secrets are protected is by running secret scanning on your GitHub repositories and using the push protection feature.
GitHub’s Secret Scanning is a feature that automatically scans your codebase for sensitive information, such as API keys, string connections, passwords, and other secrets. It works by searching for patterns in your code that match known secret formats and alerting you they are exposed. There are many supported patterns, but you can also configure the patterns for your custom secrets. This feature is particularly useful for identifying secrets that have been accidentally committed to your codebase and need to be removed.
To set up Secret Scanning, you’ll need to enable it for your repository. Once it’s enabled, GitHub will automatically scan your codebase for secrets on each push. If it finds any secrets, it will send an alert to the repository owner and give you recommendations on how to remove the secrets from your codebase.
An important feature of GitHub’s Secret Scanning is Push Protection. This feature helps you proactively protect your codebase by scanning code for secrets before they are pushed to your repository. This is a great way to ensure that code changes are thoroughly reviewed before they are incorporated into your codebase, and helps secrets from being leaked in the first place.
To set up Push Protection, you’ll need to enable it for your repository and configure the required number of reviews and status checks. Once it’s set up, GitHub will automatically check that the required number of reviews and status checks have been completed before allowing code to be merged.
By using Secret Scanning you can significantly improve the security of your codebase on GitHub. Secret scanning is an easy tool to enable and does not disrupt the developer workflow or productivity. Many organizations are surprised at the number of secrets detected when they turn on secret scanning for the first time.
Want to find out more about secret scanning and this growing area of application security? Join Xpirit and GitHub for a joint webinar on March 7th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time. We’ll walk you through the secret scanning tool, including a demo that includes setup and the developer experience.
