Web3 developer Brian Guan lost $40,000 after accidentally making his wallet keys public on GitHub.
  • 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.
  • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    180·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      412·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        17·
        6 months ago

        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.

      • JimmyMcGill@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        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.

          • PumaStoleMyBluff@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            6 months ago

            Instead of just adding whole changed files, it starts an interactive mode where it shows every hunk of diffs one by one, and asks you to input yes or no for each change. Very helpful for doing your own mini code review or sanity check before you even commit.

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      6 months ago

      And that’s why you always leave a note recheck your .gitignore file before committing

      • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        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.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      73·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • Bookmeat@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        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.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          31·
          6 months ago

          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.

      • fart_pickle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        6 months ago

        Having plain text secrets, or having secrets at all in a repository is always a bad practice. Even if it’s a super-duper private/local/no one will ever see this repo.

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    771·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • lowleveldata@programming.devEnglish
    51·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • tiramichu@lemm.eeEnglish
      54·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • daddy32@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        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…

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      40·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      6 months ago

      Oh yes absolutely, there are bots constantly crawling any open source code. A friend of mine accidentally leaked their discord API key, nuked a whole server within minutes.

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    32·
    6 months ago

    If there was any sort of password / highly entropic string detection in their build pipeline it would have caught a wallet’s keys. They aren’t an excuse for lack of diligence, but they should still be in every pipeline where passwords or keys might have to get used.

    I’m terrible about building pipelines for most of my personal projects though, so I’m throwing rocks from my glass house here.

    • barsquid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      I like your CI plan but maybe they just needed some sort of sane policy. Like never commit plaintext keys to any repo. Never work with a $40k key in a new project under development. Never convert a private repo to public.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlEnglish
    71·
    6 months ago

    I use a text file version of a novel to back up my keys, then I store the key map in multiple cloud drives. For example, if the word is “lighting” then my key map for that word would be 487,5 (line 487, word 5). Easy to crack, if you know what novel I am using.

      • zarathustrad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        To get my codes you have to play Alone in the Dark 2, and have the original 2 sided playing cards, then translate that into Brittanic runes and find the latitude and longitude of the given city on a cloth map from the original Ulitma.

  • k_rol@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    6 months ago

    I’m sad I didn’t see any comments saying he shouldn’t be using a $40k wallet key to test his software in the first place. Anything could happen with simple code mistakes…just get an empty wallet or one with a few bucks in it.

  • Johanno@feddit.deEnglish
    31·
    6 months ago

    They made 2 errors.

    1. Use crypto

    2. Storing the key anywhere close to the repo.