Finding secrets in code can be done quickly and accurately if you know their exact format and search within your own project. The task becomes significantly harder when scanning across multiple projects or an enterprise monorepo. The challenge becomes even bigger if the search area is a developer platform and your secret format is nondeterministic.

Effective secret detection and leak prevention during development are crucial for protecting projects from data breaches. The secret-scanning workflows presented here are designed for defensive use in trusted CI/CD pipelines. By combining lightning-fast push-protection scans with deeper, high-precision sweeps of large codebases, this approach enables defenders to find and revoke leaked credentials right at commit time or during routine audits. This gives them an advantage over any adversary scraping the codebase for sensitive data.

This article will walk you through the discovery phase for a secret analyzer. We’ll explore the latest secret scanning tools, understand their constraints, and identify ways to improve three key metrics of secret scanning: precision, recall, and speed.