Why is this an issue?

Hard-coding secrets in source code or binaries makes it easy for attackers to extract sensitive information, especially in distributed or open-source applications. This practice exposes credentials and tokens, increasing the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.

This rule detects keys having a name matching a list of words (secret, token, credential, auth, api[_.-]?key) being assigned a pseudorandom hard-coded value. The pseudorandomness of the hard-coded value is based on its entropy and the probability to be human-readable. The randomness sensibility can be adjusted if needed. Lower values will detect less random values, raising potentially more false positives.

How to fix it

Secrets should be stored in a configuration file that is not committed to the code repository, in a database, or managed by your cloud provider’s secrets management service. If a secret is exposed in the source code, it must be rotated immediately.

Code Examples

Noncompliant code example

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx-app
spec:
  containers:
    - name: nginx
      image: "nginx:1.21.6"
      ports:
        - containerPort: 80
      env:
        - name: API_TOKEN
          value: "f7a9s8d7f6as98df7a6s9d8f7a6sd9f87as6df"  # Noncompliant

Compliant solution

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx-app
spec:
  containers:
    - name: nginx
      image: "nginx:1.21.6"
      ports:
        - containerPort: 80
      env:
        - name: API_TOKEN
          valueFrom:
            secretKeyRef:
              name: my-secret
              key: api-key

Resources