By Golam Kayas Technical Research and Development Engineer Comcast Cable Justin Evans Software Development Engineer Comcast Cables Jayati Dev Privacy Engineer Comcast Cables Bahman Rashidi Cybersecurity & Privacy Research Director Comcast Cables Vaibhav Garg Executive Director, Cybersecurity Research & Public Policy Comcast Cables
The rise in popularity of social programming and collaborative projects proliferates the use of code sharing platforms like GitHub and Gitlab. Developers create online projects to collaborate with peers across the globe. These projects get forked, imported and shared all around, ingraining themselves into many other codebases. With over 83 million active users in 2022, GitHub and other code sharing platforms’ popularity have been rising over the years [5]. With the availability of code comes the possibility of secrets and other vulnerabilities being accidentally shared. Passwords and credentials are critical components of online security, and their unauthorized disclosure can lead to devastating consequences [31]. In a report published by Verizon in 2022 it was found that over 60% of all breaches were from stolen credentials [30]. Code-sharing platforms like GitHub, Gitlab and Bitbucket, while used for personal projects are also widely used in industry, making them a prime target for cybercriminals looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the software development process.