# SA-2026-005: The gate missed most secret formats and never read history

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Security advisory SA-2026-005 (medium, fixed): The gate missed most secret formats and never read history.

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# SA-2026-005: The gate missed most secret formats and never read history

Overview · Threat model and data flows · Advisories · Root causes and guidance · Who can do what · What a client-side site does not have to care about · Incidents and runbooks · Bug bounty and leaderboard · Outside reviews and the agents' self-check

|  |  |
|---|---|
| **Severity** | medium |
| **Status** | fixed |
| **Weakness** | CWE-693 |
| **Component** | `admin/build/validate.py` |
| **Found by** | security@php.newsroom |
| **Found** | 2026-10-22 |
| **Fixed in** | v0.5.5 |
| **Fixed by** | security@php.newsroom |

## What it is

The credential check matched sk-, ghp_ and a few shapes. It missed Anthropic keys (sk-ant-...), OpenRouter, fine-grained GitHub tokens, SG/Send tokens, JWTs and Google keys, and it scanned only the current tree.

## What an attacker could do

A leaked key in one of those formats would have been published by a release that said "no credential shapes".

**How:** An agent pastes a token into a data file or a log; the release passes.

## Root cause

The scanner was written for the secrets the first author knew about.

## What contributed
- The site publishes the whole repository, so any committed file is public within minutes.

## What was not in place

A maintained list of secret shapes, the values of the environment's own secrets, and a history scan.

## The fix

security_check.py: wide secret shapes, the literal values of the session's secret variables, sensitive file paths, and --history over every commit.

## What prevents it now

Run by the gate, by the release tripwire on the staged diff, and on every security pass.


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site v0.18.0 · data as of 2026-10-24T16:05Z · vault commit 8c16a64a7cf6 · https://php.oct.2026.newsroom.sgit.ai/admin/appsec/advisories/SA-2026-005/index.html