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AI Secret Detection

Find credentials in content before they are stored, shared, or sent anywhere.

involved AI Safety & Trust

What it adds

A detection pass that flags API keys, tokens, passwords, and private keys in submitted content and warns before it is saved.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Find the surfaces where a user can paste an arbitrary blob: comments, notes, issue descriptions, support messages, configuration fields, and file uploads. Run detection on submit, before the content is persisted.

  2. 2

    Combine three signals rather than relying on one. Match the well-known credential shapes, score high-entropy strings, and use surrounding context such as an assignment to a variable named like a secret to lift or drop confidence.

  3. 3

    Show the user a warning naming what was found and where, with only a short prefix of the value. The full secret must never appear in the alert, the notification, the audit entry, or any log.

  4. 4

    Give the user two paths: remove the value, or acknowledge a false positive with a reason. Record the acknowledgement so the same fixture does not warn on every edit.

  5. 5

    Do not attempt to revoke or rotate the credential yourself. Detection tells someone a secret is exposed; rotation runs through whatever approved credential workflow the organization already has, because rotating a live key from a content scanner breaks production.

Edge cases it handles

8
  • Known credential prefixes alone miss anything custom, and raw entropy alone flags every hash and identifier. Require agreement between at least two of pattern, entropy, and context before treating a match as high confidence.
  • Alerts, emails, audit records, and logs must show a masked fragment only. A detector that pastes the full key into a notification has published the secret more widely than the original message did.
  • An exposed credential is still live after detection. Point the user at the organization's rotation process and track whether the exposure was resolved, but do not call any provider's revocation capability from this feature.
  • Code examples, test fixtures, and documentation contain deliberate fake credentials. Support a per-path or per-record suppression with a recorded reason, so the same file does not warn on every save.
  • Attachments and model-generated text need the same scan as form fields. A key pasted into an uploaded log file is the most common way this leaks.
  • Detection must not block a save indefinitely if the scan is slow or the model is unavailable. Fall back to deterministic patterns, save, and flag the record for a follow-up scan.
  • PII masking on outbound content is owned by AI PII Redaction. This feature owns credentials on the way in; do not build a second redaction pipeline for personal data here.
  • A user who cannot see the original record must not be able to learn anything about it from the alert.

Definition of done

8
  • Every free-text and upload surface is scanned before content is persisted.
  • High-confidence findings require agreement between at least two independent signals.
  • No full secret value appears in any alert, notification, audit entry, or log.
  • Acknowledged false positives are recorded and do not re-warn on the same content.
  • Attachments and generated text are scanned alongside form fields.
  • The feature never revokes or rotates a credential itself, and directs the user to the approved workflow.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.