State of Secrets Sprawl on GitHub - 2021

GitGuardian has conducted a comprehensive study on "secrets sprawl" by scanning nearly 1 billion public commits on GitHub in 2020, revealing a 20% annual increase in the number of secrets such as API keys and credentials found in public repositories. The Octoverse, with its vast community of over 50 million developers and 2 billion commits, inadvertently hosts sensitive data that is vulnerable to exploitation. The report highlights that 85% of these leaks occur in personal repositories, even when the secrets belong to organizations, indicating the challenges in enforcing security policies across distributed codebases. Additionally, the study details the types of secrets most commonly exposed, the countries with the highest leakage rates, and file extensions frequently containing secrets, while offering tips to mitigate this issue. GitGuardian plans further analyses of the findings, including a focus on the top 10 file extensions where secrets are most often discovered.

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