Evaluating alerts from secret scanning

About evaluating alerts

There are some additional features that can help you to evaluate alerts in order to better prioritize and manage them. You can:

• Check the validity of a secret, to see if the secret is still active. Applies to GitHub tokens only. For more information, see Checking a secret's validity.
• Review a token's metadata. Applies to GitHub tokens only. For example, to see when the token was last used. For more information, see Reviewing GitHub token metadata.

Checking a secret's validity

Validity checks help you prioritize alerts by telling you which secrets are active or inactive. An active secret is one that could still be exploited, so these alerts should be reviewed and remediated as a priority.

By default, GitHub checks the validity of GitHub tokens and displays the validation status of the token in the alert view.

Organizations using GitHub Enterprise Cloud with a license for GitHub Advanced Security can also enable validity checks for partner patterns. For more information, see Checking a secret's validity in the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.

Validity	Status	Result
Active secret	active	GitHub checked with this secret's provider and found that the secret is active
Possibly active secret	unknown	GitHub does not support validation checks for this token type yet
Possibly active secret	unknown	GitHub could not verify this secret
Secret inactive	inactive	You should make sure no unauthorized access has already occurred

You can use the REST API to retrieve a list of the most recent validation status for each of your tokens. For more information, see REST API endpoints for secret scanning in the REST API documentation. You can also use webhooks to be notified of activity relating to a secret scanning alert. For more information, see the secret_scanning_alert event in Webhook events and payloads.

Reviewing GitHub token metadata

In the view for an active GitHub token alert, you can review certain metadata about the token. This metadata may help you identify the token and decide what remediation steps to take.

Tokens, like personal access token and other credentials, are considered personal information. For more information about using GitHub tokens, see Acceptable Use Policies.

Metadata for GitHub tokens is available for active tokens in any repository with secret scanning enabled. If a token has been revoked or its status cannot be validated, metadata will not be available. GitHub auto-revokes GitHub tokens in public repositories, so metadata for GitHub tokens in public repositories is unlikely to be available. The following metadata is available for active GitHub tokens:

Metadata	Description
Secret name	The name given to the GitHub token by its creator
Secret owner	The GitHub handle of the token's owner
Created on	Date the token was created
Expired on	Date the token expired
Last used on	Date the token was last used
Access	Whether the token has organization access

Next steps

• Resolving alerts from secret scanning