As organizations increasingly adopt DevOps and CI/CD pipelines, the risk of accidentally exposing secrets has only grown. In fact, according to Verizon’s trusted DBIR report, exposed secrets – like API keys, passwords, and tokens – is one of the most common causes of breaches.
Secrets scanning has emerged as a crucial defense mechanism, helping developers and security teams identify and remediate exposed secrets before they can be exploited.
This article will delve into the importance of secrets, why scanning them is non-negotiable, and how to effectively implement a scanning strategy that safeguards your organization. Along the way, we’ll explore the strengths and limitations of various tools and approaches, including how Cycode’s Complete Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform offers a comprehensive solution to this significant challenge.
What Are Secrets?
Secrets are the credentials that allow applications to communicate securely with other systems, services, and users. Here are a just few examples:
- Usernames and passwords
- Encryption keys
- API keys
- Tokens and sessions IDs
- Private keys
- Digital certificates
- Biometric data
- Configuration files
- PII
In the context of software development, secrets are often stored in configuration files, environment variables, or even hard-coded directly into the source code.
If not properly stored and managed, these secrets can be exposed and, as we’ve seen in the case of Uber’s 2016 breach, the consequences can be catastrophic.
Attackers can use leaked credentials to gain unauthorized access to systems, exfiltrate sensitive data, or even escalate their privileges within a network. The result is not just a technical issue but a business risk, with potential legal, financial, and reputational damage.
Why Is Secret Scanning Important?
Secrets are often the weakest link in your security chain, and their exposure can lead to devastating consequences.
Let’s explore why secrets scanning is crucial by examining real-world breaches, the regulatory landscape, and the proactive measures that can help safeguard your organization and avoid the severe consequences that come with exposed secrets.
Security Breaches from Exposed Secrets
Statistics show that a significant portion of security breaches stem from exposed secrets. According to recent reports, in a single year, over 6 million secrets were detected in public repositories. Attackers actively scan public and private repositories for exposed secrets, often within minutes of a commit.
Once found, these secrets can be weaponized almost immediately, leading to unauthorized access, data theft, or worse.
Compliance and Regulatory Requirements
Beyond the immediate security risks, exposed secrets can also lead to severe compliance and regulatory consequences. Regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS mandate the protection of sensitive data, including secrets. A failure to adequately protect these can result in hefty fines, legal actions, and mandatory breach disclosures, further damaging your organization’s reputation.
Proactive Security Measures
Incorporating continuous secrets scans into your development and security workflows is a proactive step towards mitigating these risks. By catching exposed secrets early in the development process—before they are committed to version control or deployed into production—you can prevent many of the scenarios that lead to security incidents.
Where You Should Be Scanning for Secrets
Given the complexity, intricacy, and velocity of today’s Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) today, secrets can be inadvertently exposed at multiple touchpoints, making it increasingly difficult for security and development teams to maintain control.
The challenges are immense – from source code management to automated pipelines and cloud infrastructure – every stage of the development process presents unique risks for secret exposure.
Importantly, remediation costs increase the later secrets are detected
Source Code Repositories
Your source code repositories, such as GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, are prime locations where secrets can accidentally be committed. Secrets can be introduced in initial commits, or they may be added during subsequent updates. It’s crucial to scan repositories for secrets regularly, including the entire commit history, as secrets may have been exposed in the past and still exist within the repository’s history.
Check out the top source code leaks from 2020-today.
CI/CD Pipelines
CI/CD pipelines automate the process of building, testing, and deploying applications. These pipelines often require access to secrets to perform their tasks, which can lead to accidental exposure if not handled correctly. For example, secrets might be logged during a build process or misconfigured in environment variables. Scanning your CI/CD pipeline configurations and logs is essential to catch these potential leaks.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Cloud Configurations
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, and Ansible are used to define and manage infrastructure in a declarative manner. These configurations can inadvertently contain secrets, especially if sensitive variables are hard-coded rather than passed securely through environment variables or secret management tools. Additionally, cloud configuration files in platforms like AWS or Azure can include secrets that, if exposed, could grant attackers access to your cloud resources.
Ticketing, Documentation, and Messaging/Productivity Tools
Development teams often use productivity tools like Slack, Jira, and Confluence for communication, documentation, and task management. In the fast-paced development environment, it’s not uncommon for developers to accidentally copy and paste secrets into these tools, exposing sensitive information to a broader audience and increasing the risk of breaches. While many secrets scanning solutions focus solely on source code and infrastructure, they often overlook these commonly used tools, leaving gaps in coverage.
Note: This list isn’t exhaustive, but it does highlight the critical areas where scanning for secrets is essential to protect your organization from potential breaches.
How to Choose a Secret Scanner
Choosing the right secrets scanner can feel like a daunting task, especially when you’re trying to satisfy the needs of both security and development teams, manage tool sprawl, and minimize false positives.
With so many options out there, each with its own set of features, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
But getting this decision right is crucial—it’s not just about catching exposed secrets; it’s about finding a tool that fits smoothly into your existing workflows that helps keep everything secure without slowing anyone down.
While specific requirements may vary organization-to-organization, here’s a general overview of what to look for when evaluating potential secret scanning tools.
Comprehensive Detection Capabilities
One of the most significant challenges in secrets management is ensuring your scanner can detect a wide array of secret types across various environments. Many tools rely on basic pattern matching or regular expressions, which may miss nuanced or obfuscated secrets. This limited coverage can leave significant gaps in your security posture.
Cycode addresses this challenge by offering comprehensive detection capabilities that go beyond simple pattern matching, and extend across ticketing, documentation, messaging tools, and productivity tools. Cycode’s proprietary scanners can recognize standard secret types like API keys, passwords, and tokens, but it also supports customization to detect organization-specific secrets. That means even the most unique or obfuscated credentials are identified and protected.
Ease of Integration and Automation
Today, integration and automation are non-negotiable. But many organizations struggle with tool sprawl, managing an average of 49 security tools that don’t always play well together. This proliferation of tools can overwhelm teams, causing visibility gaps and complicating security management.
Cycode mitigates this issue by seamlessly integrating with your existing development and security ecosystems, including version control systems, CI/CD pipelines, and IDEs. Cycode’s automation capabilities ensure continuous scanning, catching secrets the moment they are introduced without adding friction to the development process.
This integration helps streamline workflows, reduce tool fatigue, and maintain agility in your CI/CD pipeline.
Handling False Positives and Remediation
Alert fatigue and false positives are persistent challenges for both security and development teams. With nearly 50 tools generating alerts, it’s easy to see how critical threats could be overlooked amidst the noise. False positives not only waste time but can also erode trust in security tools, leading teams to ignore alerts altogether.
Cycode tackles this challenge head-on with its proprietary scanners, using advanced pattern recognition and context analysis to significantly reduce false positives. Unlike many tools, Cycode’s secret detection capabilities extend beyond just source code to also cover ticketing, documentation, and messaging/productivity tools like Slack and Jira.
This broader coverage allows Cycode to identify more areas of risk, resulting in a more comprehensive risk score. With this enriched visibility, Cycode’s advanced risk scoring system prioritizes remediation efforts based on the criticality and likelihood of exposure, helping teams focus on their most urgent risks. Cycode tackles this challenge head-on with advanced pattern recognition and context analysis to minimize false positives.
Bonus: Cycode’s remediation features are designed with developers in mind, meaning teams get clear, actionable guidance directly within their native environments.
Of course, there are other things to consider like user experience, scalability, compliance, and cost…
The following questions should help you accurately vet vendors:
- What types of secrets can your tool detect out-of-the-box, and can it be customized to detect organization-specific secrets?
- How does your solution integrate with our existing version control systems, CI/CD pipelines, and IDEs?
- Do your secret scanning and detection capabilities extend across ticketing, documentation, and messaging tools (Slack, Jira, Confluence, etc.)?
- What mechanisms are in place to minimize false positives, and how does your tool prioritize and manage alerts?
- How does your tool scale across large, multi-repository environments and handle high-frequency commits?
- How does your tool integrate into the developer’s workflow, and what remediation guidance does it provide?
- What support options are available, and what is your response time for critical issues?
- How does your solution help us comply with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS?
Complete Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) vs Point Solutions
As organizations continue to adopt a growing number of security tools to address specific needs, the problem of tool sprawl has become increasingly apparent. Managing multiple, disconnected solutions can overwhelm teams, lead to fragmented security practices, and create gaps in visibility.
With each new tool, the complexity increases, raising the question: Do you really need another point solution, or is it time to consider a more holistic approach to application security?
| Feature | Points Solutions | ASPM |
| Scope of Coverage | Focused on one specific security aspect. | Comprehensive coverage across the entire SDLC, including secrets scanning, AST, CI/CD pipeline security, compliance. Importantly, secrets detection extends across ticketing, documentation, productivity tools, and messaging tools.. |
| Integration | Often requires multiple tools, leading to integration challenges and tool sprawl. | Provides a unified platform with seamless integration across different security practices. |
| Visibility | Fragmented visibility; critical issues may be overlooked if they fall outside the tool’s scope. | Holistic visibility across all security activities, ensuring no gaps in the security posture. |
| Management Complexity | High complexity due to managing multiple tools; potential for inconsistent security practices. | Simplifies management by centralizing security functions into one platform, reducing complexity and enhancing consistency. |
| Scalability | Can be challenging to scale effectively as each tool operates independently. | Scales more efficiently with centralized management, supporting growth without increasing complexity. |
| Alert Fatigue & False Positives | Higher likelihood of alert fatigue due to uncoordinated tools generating overlapping or excessive alerts. | Reduces alert fatigue by prioritizing and consolidating alerts from multiple security practices, focusing on the most critical issues. |
| Developer & Security Collaboration | Collaboration can be hindered by disjointed tools that don’t integrate well with developer workflows. | Enhances collaboration by integrating security seamlessly into development workflows, reducing friction and improving response times. |
| Cost Efficiency | Higher costs due to licensing and maintaining multiple point solutions. | Often more cost-effective due to the consolidation of multiple security practices into a single platform. |
| Compliance & Reporting | Reporting can be inconsistent and fragmented across different tools. | Provides comprehensive, consistent reporting and compliance tracking across all security activities. |
Limitations of Point Solutions
While point solutions can be highly effective in addressing specific security needs, they often fall short in providing a comprehensive view of your organization’s overall security posture. For example, a standalone secrets scanner might be great at detecting exposed secrets, but it won’t give you insights into other crucial issues, like vulnerabilities in your codebase or infrastructure misconfigurations. This narrow focus can result in overwhelming lists of vulnerabilities without prioritization, making it difficult for teams to focus on what matters most. Additionally, because point solutions often have limited scanning capabilities, they may miss critical vulnerabilities that fall outside their specific scope, leaving gaps in your security strategy.
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is gaining traction as a solution to these challenges, offering an integrated approach that streamlines security operations, reduces tool fatigue, and ultimately provides to a more cohesive and effective security strategy.
What is Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)?
ASPM offers a unified, comprehensive view of security across the entire SDLC, integrating multiple security practices—such as Application Security Testing (AST), CI/CD pipeline security, and compliance management—into a single platform.
This integrated approach not only simplifies security management but also enhances visibility and reduces the risk of overlooking critical vulnerabilities.
Importantly, only complete ASPM platforms offer a comprehensive suite of proprietary application security scanning tools and give organizations the flexibility to select and connect the third-party tools that are right for their unique ecosystem and requirements.
It’s no wonder, according to Gartner, 40% of organizations that develop proprietary applications are expected to adopt ASPM by 2026. This shift highlights the growing recognition that a holistic approach to security is necessary to keep up with the complexity and pace of modern software development.
Don’t get left behind.
Get Peace Of Mind With Cycode’s Complete ASPM
Cycode’s complete ASPM platform provides visibility, prioritization, and remediation to help security, developers, and DevOps teams to detect secrets in code and prevent secrets exposure.
- Visibility: Cycode’s comprehensive scanning capabilities detect secrets across source code, build logs, infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, version history, and productivity tools like Slack and Confluence.
- Prioritization: Cycode’s risk scoring prioritizes remediation based on the criticality, location, and likelihood of exposure, helping teams focus on the most impactful issues.
- Remediation: Cycode’s developer-friendly workflows prevent secrets from entering codebases, while providing tools to find and fix leaks within developers’ native environments.
- Custom Policies and Alerts: Cycode supports custom secrets and policies, promptly notifies users of public source code exposure, and integrates workflows to send alerts, create tickets, and automatically resolve exposures, ensuring comprehensive and tailored security management.
- Prevention: Cycode’s secret scanning and secrets detection capabilities prevent secrets from entering code or being exposed and leaked.
