Learn about the different types of secret scanning alerts.
Repository owners, organization owners, security managers, and users with the admin role
Secret scanning is available for the following repository types:
There are three types of secret scanning alerts:
When GitHub detects a supported secret in a repository that has secret scanning enabled, a user alert is generated and displayed in the Security tab of the repository.
User alerts can be of the following types:
GitHub displays generic alerts in a different list to default alerts, making triaging a better experience for users. 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.
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.
bypassed: true
Note
You can also enable push protection for your personal account, called "push protection for users", which prevents you from accidentally pushing supported secrets to any public repository. Alerts are not created if you choose to bypass your user-based push protection only. Alerts are only created if the repository itself has push protection enabled. For more information, see Push protection for users.
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.
When GitHub detects a leaked secret in a public repository or npm package, an alert is sent directly to the secret provider, if they are part of GitHub's secret scanning partner program. For more information about secret scanning alerts for partners, see Supported secret scanning patterns.
Partner alerts are not sent to repository administrators, so you do not need to take any action for this type of alert.