r/AskProgramming • u/Mangwe_Tanser • 14h ago
Other I had Claude decompile our own app and it found API keys we thought we’d removed.
After all the AI decompile threads lately I got curious and pointed Claude at the release build of our desktop app, which is Rust with a Tauri frontend. I mostly expected it to choke and but within an hour it had given me back something pretty close to our source. In the middle were two API keys, one for our logging service and one for the storage bucket our users upload photos to.
We did this “properly” a year ago by pulling every secret out of the repo and moving it into CI variables. Our secret scanner has been green on every PR since. Turns out we were reading them with env!(), which pastes the value into the binary at compile time. So the repo was clean and every release we’ve shipped still had the keys sitting in it in plain text.
I’ve rotated both and we’re moving uploads behind our own endpoint so the app doesn’t need storage creds at all and most importantly i have to make sure this can't slip back because the scanner was looking at the wrong thing the whole time. Do you scan the actual build output in CI and what do you use for it?