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In either case, the secret is already out whether the user wants to admit to it or not
by iakh 7y ago
In either case, the secret is already out whether the user wants to admit to it or not
- soulofmischief 7y agoBut in one case, damage is mitigated because the sys admins didn't assume everyone is infallible and strictly adheres to protocol.
- danharaj 7y agoThe correct way to deal with fallibility in this situation is to make it feasible to change secrets when they leak, not pretend they weren't leaked.
- soulofmischief 7y agoThat doesn't prevent someone from not following protocol.
- _II__II_ 7y agoIt's not their job to prevent that.
- soulofmischief 7y agoIt is a sys admin's job to mitigate damage from security leaks and to introduce hardened, fault-tolerant security paradigms.
- mkagenius 7y agoYou are just hacking the leaves. Once the secret is posted. It is public, it has multiple copy elsewhere on the internet. Even if you delete there is a copy kept somewhere on the internet -- and that's not an assumption. For example, iirc, Github copy is dumped to google every some-x-time.
- justinclift 7y agoHmmm, it seems like having layered security, where accidentally exposed credentials aren't automatically "game over" would be better than not. Not sure how practical that is to implement for every technology, but for many it could probably be done. Seems like a time+money vs risk trade off thing.
- wybiral 7y agoIs it mitigated? Once it's leaked you can't force everyone who may have captured it to delete it. So GitHub deleting it doesn't solve the problem.
- soulofmischief 7y agoThe definition of mitigation is to make something less severe. Yes, GitHub making this policy as clear as possible and allowing controls to toggle it per-repository or per-account mitigates the problem.