the wildest part is algolia just not responding. you email them saying "hey 39 of your customers have admin keys in their frontend" and they ghost you? thats way worse than the keys themselves imo. like the whole point of docsearch is they manage the crawling FOR you, but then the "run your own crawler" docs basically hand you a footgun with zero guardrails. they could just... not issue admin-scoped keys through that flow
gregoriol3 hours ago
Why contact Algolia when it is the users' responsibility to handle their keys? Contact all the users.
Kwpolska56 minutes ago
If this happens so often, perhaps Algolia should improve their stuff to prevent this? For example, by implementing a dedicated search endpoint that doesn't accept normal API keys, but only dedicated read-only keys.
pmdr2 hours ago
Twenty years ago every PHP website had search. We forgot how to do it.
omnimus2 hours ago
To be fair, the search was thanks to databases and it was usually not very good (it takes work to set correctly).
netsharc11 hours ago
Man, talk about unnecessary graphs... ok graph 2 is maybe tolerable, although it's showing the popularity of the projects, not a metric of how many errors/vulnerabilities found in those projects.
I'm not a newspaper editor, but I think if this was an article for one, they'd also say the graphs are unnecessary. It smells of "I need some visual stuff to make this text interesting"...
binarymax10 hours ago
Dude there’s only three graphs in there. Do they really bother you that much? The third may be a bit unnecessary but I think the visuals add to the post.
netsharc10 hours ago
[flagged]
shermantanktop9 hours ago
If you’re “helping a kid” then I guess I can help you. Help is criticism delivered with a constructive tone. Criticism can be helpful if you look past the tone.
If you want to help, you should sound helpful.
saghm5 hours ago
Fully agreed; this is something that always baffles me when it's misunderstood so often. Regardless of whether it's logical or not, tone and attitude in practice does influence whether people are convinced by something, so if your goal is to actually change how someone else acts, you will not be as effective if you don't care about how you come across. Being right is not always enough, so even if the style of communicating doesn't seem like it "should" matter, in practice it genuinely does if success is measured by whether the change happens or not.
Of course, if the goal is just to be right rather than to convince someone else about what's right, how you're saying something doesn't matter, but at that point you've already reached the goal before you started talking to them, so it's worth reexamining what you're actually looking to get out of a conversation at that point.
integralid10 hours ago
I liked the graphs. When skimming posts i often stop on graphical elements and decide if I want to understand the context or continue skimming. In this context, all three graphs were useful for me.
Posts with just text are sense and just not nice to read. That's why even text-only blog posts have a tendency to include loosely-related image at the top, to catch reader's eye.
throwaway546511 hours ago
It's Friday night / Saturday morning. Who wants to be reading text?
Especially on night mode themes.
Besides, can we read anymore? In the age of 'GPT summarise it me' attention spans and glib commentary not about the content of the article being all many people have to add, perhaps liberal application of visualisations adds digestive value.
still 404 but the standard is .well-known/security.txt
trrra3 hours ago
Is this aloglia's (or any provider) responsability or each individual integration ?
stickynotememo11 hours ago
So why hasn't the HomeAssistant docs page been nuked yet?
TechSquidTV10 hours ago
I have been developing an OpenClaw-like agent that automates exactly this type of attack.
_pdp_10 hours ago
Why? This is just regex search and there are plenty of tools that do this perfectly fine.
emotiveengine6 hours ago
Have to agree with _pdp_ on this one. I just don't see the need for an LLM agent to do a recursive grep for API keys in public repos.
Not saying people shouldn't build these tools, but the use case is lost on me.
It feels like the industry is in this weird phase of trying to replace 30-year-old, perfectly optimized shell utilities with multi-shot agent workflows that literally cost money to run. A basic Python script with a regex matcher and the GitHub API will find these keys faster, cheaper, and more reliably.
system29 hours ago
None of those proven tools would make a man feel like a wannabe Mr. Robot.
hrmtst938373 hours ago
Automating these sweeps works fine until you need to escalate beyond public misconfig and start hitting rate limits or WAF traps, at that point, blending in gets harder than it looks. If you focus on fast key discovery, expect a lot of false positives unless you build context awareness for the apps those keys unlock, otherwise you just end up chasing useless tokens all day.
fix4fun11 hours ago
Interesting how many people already are playing with these API keys ? ;)
toomuchtodo12 hours ago
Great write up. Reminder that if you commit these to a Github Gist and the provider partners with GitHub for secrets scanning, they’ll rapidly be invalidated.
pwdisswordfishy11 hours ago
That's just a tautology.
"If the secrets issuer partners with X-corp for secret scanning so that secrets get invalidated when you X them, then when you X them the secrets will be invalidated".
The above is a true statement for all X.
nightpool11 hours ago
? Yes? Toomuchtodo is reminding the author (and other commenters), that github gists are one way to make sure secrets are secured / remediated before making a public post like this. Maybe not the most responsible whitehat action, but I can see it being useful in some cases where outreach is impractical / has failed.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Algolia has implemented this
TurdF3rguson10 hours ago
I'm not following this at all. It seems like OP is saying if you share a secret in your (private?) gist and give Algolia permission to read the gist, they will invalidate it. But why would the secret be in a gist and not a repo? Also if you're aware enough to add that partner it seems you're aware to not do dumb things like that in the first place.
richbell10 hours ago
If you find an exposed token in the wild, for a service supported by GitHub Secret Scanning, uploading it to a Gist will either immediately revoke it or notify the owner.
TurdF3rguson9 hours ago
Ok I see, so any public gist with an algolia key in it will get invalidated? And it would have to follow some pattern like ALGOLIA_KEY=xxx ?
wat1000011 hours ago
English is not formal logic.
In formal logic, that statement is true whether X is GitHub, or Lockheed-Martin, Safeway, or the local hardware store.
In English, the statement serves to inform (or remind) you that GitHub has a secret scanning program that many providers actually do partner with.
pwdisswordfishy10 hours ago
Yes, and in the real world where Grice's Maxim of Relevance is in force, then when the secrets issuer that is the subject of the discussion isn't one of those partners, then an informative "reminder" that GitHub "has a secret scanning program" with a bunch of other partners is not actually informative. It's as superfluous and unhelpful as calling to let someone know you're not interested in the item they've posted for sale on Craiglist (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWG3jKzKcm8>).
wat1000010 hours ago
It's more useful than telling someone that their statement is a tautology in formal logic.
richbell10 hours ago
How is reminding people that they can safely revoke exposed API keys not informative? Why are you being so combative?
the wildest part is algolia just not responding. you email them saying "hey 39 of your customers have admin keys in their frontend" and they ghost you? thats way worse than the keys themselves imo. like the whole point of docsearch is they manage the crawling FOR you, but then the "run your own crawler" docs basically hand you a footgun with zero guardrails. they could just... not issue admin-scoped keys through that flow
Why contact Algolia when it is the users' responsibility to handle their keys? Contact all the users.
If this happens so often, perhaps Algolia should improve their stuff to prevent this? For example, by implementing a dedicated search endpoint that doesn't accept normal API keys, but only dedicated read-only keys.
Twenty years ago every PHP website had search. We forgot how to do it.
To be fair, the search was thanks to databases and it was usually not very good (it takes work to set correctly).
Man, talk about unnecessary graphs... ok graph 2 is maybe tolerable, although it's showing the popularity of the projects, not a metric of how many errors/vulnerabilities found in those projects.
I'm not a newspaper editor, but I think if this was an article for one, they'd also say the graphs are unnecessary. It smells of "I need some visual stuff to make this text interesting"...
Dude there’s only three graphs in there. Do they really bother you that much? The third may be a bit unnecessary but I think the visuals add to the post.
[flagged]
If you’re “helping a kid” then I guess I can help you. Help is criticism delivered with a constructive tone. Criticism can be helpful if you look past the tone.
If you want to help, you should sound helpful.
Fully agreed; this is something that always baffles me when it's misunderstood so often. Regardless of whether it's logical or not, tone and attitude in practice does influence whether people are convinced by something, so if your goal is to actually change how someone else acts, you will not be as effective if you don't care about how you come across. Being right is not always enough, so even if the style of communicating doesn't seem like it "should" matter, in practice it genuinely does if success is measured by whether the change happens or not.
Of course, if the goal is just to be right rather than to convince someone else about what's right, how you're saying something doesn't matter, but at that point you've already reached the goal before you started talking to them, so it's worth reexamining what you're actually looking to get out of a conversation at that point.
I liked the graphs. When skimming posts i often stop on graphical elements and decide if I want to understand the context or continue skimming. In this context, all three graphs were useful for me.
Posts with just text are sense and just not nice to read. That's why even text-only blog posts have a tendency to include loosely-related image at the top, to catch reader's eye.
It's Friday night / Saturday morning. Who wants to be reading text?
Especially on night mode themes.
Besides, can we read anymore? In the age of 'GPT summarise it me' attention spans and glib commentary not about the content of the article being all many people have to add, perhaps liberal application of visualisations adds digestive value.
https://www.algolia.com/security.txt 404
still 404 but the standard is .well-known/security.txt
Is this aloglia's (or any provider) responsability or each individual integration ?
So why hasn't the HomeAssistant docs page been nuked yet?
I have been developing an OpenClaw-like agent that automates exactly this type of attack.
Why? This is just regex search and there are plenty of tools that do this perfectly fine.
Have to agree with _pdp_ on this one. I just don't see the need for an LLM agent to do a recursive grep for API keys in public repos.
Not saying people shouldn't build these tools, but the use case is lost on me.
It feels like the industry is in this weird phase of trying to replace 30-year-old, perfectly optimized shell utilities with multi-shot agent workflows that literally cost money to run. A basic Python script with a regex matcher and the GitHub API will find these keys faster, cheaper, and more reliably.
None of those proven tools would make a man feel like a wannabe Mr. Robot.
Automating these sweeps works fine until you need to escalate beyond public misconfig and start hitting rate limits or WAF traps, at that point, blending in gets harder than it looks. If you focus on fast key discovery, expect a lot of false positives unless you build context awareness for the apps those keys unlock, otherwise you just end up chasing useless tokens all day.
Interesting how many people already are playing with these API keys ? ;)
Great write up. Reminder that if you commit these to a Github Gist and the provider partners with GitHub for secrets scanning, they’ll rapidly be invalidated.
That's just a tautology.
"If the secrets issuer partners with X-corp for secret scanning so that secrets get invalidated when you X them, then when you X them the secrets will be invalidated".
The above is a true statement for all X.
? Yes? Toomuchtodo is reminding the author (and other commenters), that github gists are one way to make sure secrets are secured / remediated before making a public post like this. Maybe not the most responsible whitehat action, but I can see it being useful in some cases where outreach is impractical / has failed.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Algolia has implemented this
I'm not following this at all. It seems like OP is saying if you share a secret in your (private?) gist and give Algolia permission to read the gist, they will invalidate it. But why would the secret be in a gist and not a repo? Also if you're aware enough to add that partner it seems you're aware to not do dumb things like that in the first place.
If you find an exposed token in the wild, for a service supported by GitHub Secret Scanning, uploading it to a Gist will either immediately revoke it or notify the owner.
Ok I see, so any public gist with an algolia key in it will get invalidated? And it would have to follow some pattern like ALGOLIA_KEY=xxx ?
English is not formal logic.
In formal logic, that statement is true whether X is GitHub, or Lockheed-Martin, Safeway, or the local hardware store.
In English, the statement serves to inform (or remind) you that GitHub has a secret scanning program that many providers actually do partner with.
Yes, and in the real world where Grice's Maxim of Relevance is in force, then when the secrets issuer that is the subject of the discussion isn't one of those partners, then an informative "reminder" that GitHub "has a secret scanning program" with a bunch of other partners is not actually informative. It's as superfluous and unhelpful as calling to let someone know you're not interested in the item they've posted for sale on Craiglist (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWG3jKzKcm8>).
It's more useful than telling someone that their statement is a tautology in formal logic.
How is reminding people that they can safely revoke exposed API keys not informative? Why are you being so combative?
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