About types of alerts
There are two types of secret scanning alerts:
- Secret scanning alerts: Reported to users in the Security tab of the repository, when a supported secret is detected in the repository.
- Push protection alerts: Reported to users in the Security tab of the repository, when a contributor bypasses push protection.
About secret scanning alerts
When GitHub detects a supported secret in a repository that has secret scanning enabled, a secret scanning alert is generated and displayed in the Security tab of the repository.
secret scanning alerts can be of the following types:
- High confidence alerts, which relate to supported patterns and specified custom patterns.
- Other alerts, which have a higher ratio of false positives, and correspond to secrets such as private keys.
GitHub displays these "other" alerts in a different list to high confidence alerts, making triaging a better experience for users. For more information, see "Viewing and filtering alerts from secret scanning."
Note: The detection of non-provider patterns is currently in beta and subject to change.
If access to a resource requires paired credentials, then secret scanning will create an alert only when both parts of the pair are detected in the same file. This ensures that the most critical leaks are not hidden behind information about partial leaks. Pair matching also helps reduce false positives since both elements of a pair must be used together to access the provider's resource.
About push protection alerts
Push protection scans pushes for supported secrets. If push protection detects a supported secret, it will block the push. When a contributor bypasses push protection to push a secret to the repository, a push protection alert is generated and displayed in the Security tab of the repository. To see all push protection alerts for a repository, you must filter by bypassed: true on the alerts page. For more information, see "Viewing and filtering alerts from secret scanning."
If access to a resource requires paired credentials, then secret scanning will create an alert only when both parts of the pair are detected in the same file. This ensures that the most critical leaks are not hidden behind information about partial leaks. Pair matching also helps reduce false positives since both elements of a pair must be used together to access the provider's resource.
Note
Older versions of certain tokens may not be supported by push protection as these tokens may generate a higher number of false positives than their most recent version. Push protection may also not apply to legacy tokens. For tokens such as Azure Storage Keys, GitHub only supports recently created tokens, not tokens that match the legacy patterns. For more information about push protection limitations, see "Troubleshooting secret scanning."