Secret leaks often occur when a sensitive piece of authentication data is stored with the source code of an application. Considering the source code is intended to be deployed across multiple assets, including source code repositories or application hosting servers, the secrets might get exposed to an unintended audience.

Why is this an issue?

In most cases, trust boundaries are violated when a secret is exposed in a source code repository or an uncontrolled deployment environment. Unintended people who don’t need to know the secret might get access to it. They might then be able to use it to gain unwanted access to associated services or resources.

The trust issue can be more or less severe depending on the people’s role and entitlement.

If an attacker gains access to a DigitalOcean personal access token or OAuth token, they might be able to compromise your DigitalOcean environment. This includes control over Droplets and any applications that are running, as well as databases and other assets that are managed by the account.

What is the potential impact?

If an attacker manages to gain access to the DigitalOcean environment, there exist several ways that they could seriously harm your organization. Any data that is stored in the environment could be leaked, but the environment itself could even be tampered with.

Compromise of sensitive data

If the affected service is used to store or process personally identifiable information or other sensitive data, attackers knowing an authentication secret could be able to access it. Depending on the type of data that is compromised, it could lead to privacy violations, identity theft, financial loss, or other negative outcomes.

In most cases, a company suffering a sensitive data compromise will face a reputational loss when the security issue is publicly disclosed.

Infrastructure takeover

By obtaining a leaked secret, an attacker can gain control over your organization’s DigitalOcean infrastructure. They can modify DNS settings, redirect traffic, or launch malicious instances that can be used for various nefarious activities, including launching DDoS attacks, hosting phishing websites, or distributing malware. Malicious instances may also be used for resource-intensive tasks such as cryptocurrency mining.

This can result in legal liability, but also increased costs, degraded performance, and potential service disruptions.

Furthermore, corporate DigitalOcean infrastructures are often connected to other services and to the internal networks of the organization. Because of this, cloud infrastructure is often used by attackers as a gateway to other assets. Attackers can leverage this gateway to gain access to more services, to compromise more business-critical data and to cause more damage to the overall infrastructure.

How to fix it

Revoke the secret

Revoke any leaked secrets and remove them from the application source code.

Before revoking the secret, ensure that no other applications or processes are using it. Other usages of the secret will also be impacted when the secret is revoked.

Use a secret vault

A secret vault should be used to generate and store the new secret. This will ensure the secret’s security and prevent any further unexpected disclosure.

Depending on the development platform and the leaked secret type, multiple solutions are currently available.

Code examples

Noncompliant code example

require 'droplet_kit'

token = 'dop_v1_1adc4095c3c676ff1c31789a1a86480195a5b3d955010c94fcfa554b34640e1e'  # Noncompliant
client = DropletKit::Client.new(access_token: token)

Compliant solution

require 'droplet_kit'

token = ENV['DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN']
client = DropletKit::Client.new(access_token: token)