Finding leaked passwords with AI: How we built Copilot secret scanning

Copilot secret scanning, a feature of GitHub Secret Protection, uses AI to enhance the detection of generic passwords in codebases, addressing the limitations of traditional regular expression methods. The development process involved overcoming challenges such as handling unconventional file types and optimizing AI models for precision and recall. The team implemented a mix of strategies, including various prompting techniques and resource management improvements, to refine the detection system and reduce false positives. By integrating a workload-aware request management system, they effectively balanced resource usage across different scanning tasks, resulting in a significant reduction in false positives. Following a successful private and public preview phase, which demonstrated a notable decrease in false positives and maintained detection accuracy, Copilot secret scanning is now available to all GitHub Secret Protection customers, contributing to enhanced application security.

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