Code Security should check for content

[cmcknigh]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Secret scanning

Discussion Details

It flagged the line:

GITHUB_APP_PRIVATE_KEY="-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n...\n-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----"

The key has no content; it is the example of the content that the variable should contain, but it has no actual key in it.

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[henry-collins101]

This is a false positive. Secret scanning is likely matching the private key pattern and not checking whether the value contains a real key. If the example is only placeholder text, it would be useful if the scanner could better distinguish templates from actual secrets or allow an easy way to mark safe examples.

[AhmadHassan-BTed]

See, Secret Scanning is very aggressive; it just runs a regex looking for the exact -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- string and doesn't actually calculate the entropy or length of the body to see if it's real or not.

Try these, they work:

1. Change your placeholder text to -----BEGIN EXAMPLE PRIVATE KEY-----. It communicates the exact same thing to your team, but it breaks GitHub's regex so the scanner completely ignores it.
2. If this snippet is sitting in a .env.example or documentation file, you can tell the scanner to ignore that specific path by setting up a .github/secret_scanning.yml file in your repo.

For the alert that is already stuck in your repository, just go to the Security tab and dismiss it as "Used in tests" or a "False Positive." GitHub actually uses those manual dismissals to train their scanner to be less trigger-happy with templates.