Researcher Finds 26,400 Live Cloud and AI Credentials in Public Gitee Repositories

Tens of thousands of credentials left in public code on Gitee, a Chinese code-hosting service, were still valid when tested, according to independent researcher Ben Zimmermann. He scanned 7.25 million public repositories and reported the findings on October 28.

The 26,400 working credentials were mostly keys for cloud and AI services. Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs made up the largest group at 9,473, followed by 3,805 YouTube API keys, 3,170 DeepSeek keys, 1,489 keys for Zhipu's BigModel platform and 1,348 OpenAI keys. Smaller numbers appeared for GitHub, AWS, Google Cloud and Gemini. One was described as an active organization-admin credential for a major enterprise AI platform, which Zimmermann did not name.

Zimmermann alerted the vendors with the most exposed keys but did not contact the developers who leaked them. At publication he had not confirmed any of the credentials had been revoked, so anyone who has pushed a key to a public Gitee repository should not assume it is safe. He did not give the dates of the roughly month-long scan or say whether anyone else had used the keys.

Two scanners, TruffleHog and Kingfisher, checked each credential against its issuing service and kept only those that worked, reading full commit history so keys later deleted from code were still counted. TruffleHog found 12,737 working credentials and Kingfisher 14,664, with only 1,001 found by both.

By commit date, 12,242 of the credentials came from 2025, nearly half the total, and some dated to the late 2000s. Gitee's rate of 3.64 working credentials per 1,000 repositories was higher than earlier TruffleHog-only scans of GitLab (3.11) and Bitbucket (2.39), though Zimmermann noted neither figure shows which platform leaks more.

Any key ever pushed to a public Gitee repository should be treated as exposed and revoked at the provider, since deleting it from code or rewriting history does not revoke it. Alibaba Cloud advises creating a new AccessKey pair, switching apps to it, then disabling and deleting the old one while checking for unexpected charges; Google recommends rotating keys and adding API restrictions; OpenAI advises rotating immediately and setting spend limits.

Source: The Hackers News