- Web3 developer Brian Guan lost $40,000 after accidentally posting his wallet’s secret keys publicly on GitHub, with the funds being drained in just two minutes.
- The crypto community’s reactions were mixed, with some offering support and others mocking Guan’s previous comments about developers using AI tools like ChatGPT for coding.
- This incident highlights ongoing debates about security practices and the role of AI in software development within the crypto community.
The developer said he forgot that his secret keys were in the repository.
If you have your secret keys in your repository you’ve already fucked up, long before you accidentally make that repository public.
One of the first things you should do in a repo is add a .gitignore file and make sure there are rules to ignore things like *secret* or *private* etc. Also, I pretty much never use git add . because I don’t like the laziness of it and EVERY TIME one of my coworkers checked in secrets they were using that command.
Even though that’s a good extra precaution, per person config data, such as keys, should be stored outside of the repo, eg. in the parent directory or better in the users home dir. There is zero reason to have it in the repo. Even if you use a VM/containers, you can add the config in an extra mount/share.
What’s the general consensus on storing encrypted data in the repo with the keys outside? I see people recommend that but I’m too paranoid and my secrets are very small in size so it hasn’t been necessary.
I basically always do a git add -p
Very useful command and it works with other git commands as well.
Everytime a colleague asks me for help with git that’s the one rule I suggest them to use.
Better yet you can configure gitignore globally for git. I do this mostly to avoid polluting repo ignore files with my editor specific junk but *.key and similar can help prevent accidents.
For personal projects that’s definitely a good idea. For team projects I like to keep that stuff in the project still so the “experience” of working in the project is mostly consistent.
I never understood why everyone uses it as a ignore list. In my own and work repositories I always exclude everything by default and re-add stuff explicitly. I have had enough random crap checked in in the past by coworkers. Granted, the whole source folder is fully included but that has never been a problem.
I use this as a pre-commit hook https://github.com/americanexpress/earlybird
And that’s why you always leave a note recheck your .gitignore file before committing
Does Microsoft’s GitHub offer any pre-receive hook configuration to reject commits pushed that contain private keys? Surely that would be a better feature to opt all users into rather than Windows Copilot.
They notify but iirc only if you push a commit to a public repo. The dev in the article pushed it to a private repo, then later made the repo public.
I can’t understand how people use git from the command line without a proper visual tool such as Sublime Merge
Ehhh. I mean, I have local repositories that contain things that I wouldn’t want to share with the world. Using git to manage files isn’t equivalent to wanting to publish publicly on github.
I could imagine ways that private information could leak. Like, okay, say you have some local project, and you’re committing notes in a text file to the project. It’s local, so you don’t need to sanitize it, can put any related information into the notes. Or maybe you have a utility script that does some multi-machine build, has credentials embedded in it. But then over time, you clean the thing up for release and forget that the material is in the git history, and ten years later, do an open-source release or something.
I do kind of think that there’s an argument that someone should make a “lint”-type script to automatically run on GitHub pushes to try and sanity-check and maybe warn about someone pushing out material that maybe they don’t want to be pushing to the world. It’ll never be a 100% solution, but it could maybe catch some portion of leakage.
Users often don’t take care to separate private and public environments. They just dump all their stuff into one and expect their brain to make the correct decision all the time.
Put your private data into a private space. Never put private data into a mixed use space or a public space.
e.g. Don’t use your personal email at work. Don’t use your personal phone for business. Don’t put your passwords or crypto keys in the same github or gitlab account or even instance and don’t reuse passwords and keys, etc.
Put your private data into a private space. Never put private data into a mixed use space or a public space.
Sure, but nothing I said conflicts with that.
I’m talking about a situation where someone has a private repository, and then one day down the line decide that they want to transition it to a public repository.
You’re not creating the repository with the intention that it is public, nor intending to mix information that should be public and private together.
That’s exactly what pre-commit.com project is doing
I have no sympathy for him, if he is a crypto developer he knows how important those private keys are. And he also knows people scrape public areas all the time looking for keys just like that. The whole point of crypto is to be immutable, so that money is simply lost to him now.
He seems to know how much of a dumb mistake that was, although his description of himself was a bit more colorful.
You’re not wrong about how important those keys are and how he definitely should have known better. But I at least have a little sympathy for the guy. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time, even with important stuff. Hopefully they are lucky enough not to lose 40k on one but unfortunately he wasn’t. Whether he should have known better or not, that just plain sucks.
The whole point of crypto is to be immutable, so that money is simply lost to him now.
IIRC there are several cases where some group of people lost big enough coins and force most of the miners to fork to get their money back. Not bitcoin though.
I can’t believe someone would be so stupid and careless as to develop Web3 software.
They made 2 errors.
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Use crypto
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Storing the key anywhere close to the repo.
You need an escape backslash character (\) before the #3 so it doesn’t show as a #1.
It must be automated for it to happen in 2 minutes. Which implies these kind of things happen often enough for someone to write a script for it.
Yes, it absolutely is automated.
There are bots running constantly looking for things that match patterns for exploitable credentials in public commits.
AWS credentials
SSH keys
Crypto wallets
Bank card info
If you push secrets to a public github repo, they will be exploited almost immediately.
The scanning part is definitely automated by many different actors (for the gains or the “lulz”), but being this fast, also automated key usage (account draining) must have been implemented which is a bit more impressive…
Not really. All of the underlying mechanics of crypto are so simple that they can be very easily interacted with by bots. Bots make up the vast majority of all crypto trades; mostly wash trading, but also front-running attacks, scams or outright thefts like this one. There are so many exploitable flaws in crypto that every bug is basically a self-executing bug bounty.
If it was a script I wrote, it would have successfully stolen the $40k, but also stolen my own money and deposit both sets of money into a second intended victims account because I forgot to clear a variable before the main loop runs again.
