Bradley Reaves

A Comparative Study of Software Secrets Reporting by Secret Detection Tools

2023 · arXiv (Cornell University)

Background: According to GitGuardian's monitoring of public GitHub repositories, secrets sprawl continued accelerating in 2022 by 67% compared to 2021, exposing over 10 million secrets (API keys and other credentials). Though many open-source and proprietary …

RiskHarvester: A Risk-based Tool to Prioritize Secret Removal Efforts in Software Artifacts

2025 · arXiv (Cornell University)

Since 2020, GitGuardian has been detecting checked-in hard-coded secrets in GitHub repositories. During 2020-2023, GitGuardian has observed an upward annual trend and a four-fold increase in hard-coded secrets, with 12.8 million exposed in 2023. However, …