Git commit history reveals secret about todo-list-app

[larymak]

Commit e4ae7c5 reveals a production secret. Although it's later obscured in commit c25a1c6, it's still present in the commit history and can be found by someone who was looking to misuse it.

I don't know if this one is still in use, but in order to truly obscure it, it needs to be removed from the commit history.

If you want to keep it and are sure it's no longer in use, it may be a good idea to warn other new developers that just adding a commit to hide an exposed secret is not sufficient to protect it - and best practice is to revoke it since if someone accessed and saved it while it was public then even doing everything to make it private again doesn't guarantee it's safe.

That goes especially for new developers I think, so they don't take it as an example of what to do.

Side note: I came here from your article https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-write-a-good-readme-file/, thank you for writing it :)

Hi @conormckenzie
Thanks for pointing that out, though the project was just a sample and is no longer in use I will definitely be on the look out for such occurrences in the future.

[conormckenzie]

Commit e4ae7c5
reveals a production secret.
Although it's later obscured in commit c25a1c6, it's still present in the commit history and can be found by someone who was looking to misuse it.

I don't know if this one is still in use, but in order to truly obscure it, it needs to be removed from the commit history.

If you want to keep it and are sure it's no longer in use, it may be a good idea to warn other new developers that just adding a commit to hide an exposed secret is not sufficient to protect it - and best practice is to revoke it since if someone accessed and saved it while it was public then even doing everything to make it private again doesn't guarantee it's safe.

That goes especially for new developers I think, so they don't take it as an example of what to do.

Side note: I came here from your article https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-write-a-good-readme-file/, thank you for writing it :)