Counting leaked keys: the KeyRotate page now shows them as they happen

Published 2026-10-26

The KeyRotate page now opens with a counter of API keys leaking onto public GitHub, and it keeps climbing while you read. At the current pace a key for an AI service goes public about every 25 seconds, and a secret of some kind almost every second. Leave the page open for ten minutes and about two dozen more AI keys will have joined the count, and some 550 secrets in all.

What the counters show

The large number counts keys and tokens for AI services, the kind coding agents and LLM apps run on, pushed to public GitHub since 1 January. Below it, a second counter covers every kind of secret: cloud credentials, database passwords, private keys, tokens for payment and messaging services. A line in between tells you how many AI keys have leaked since you opened the page.

Both are estimates, and the page says so. Nobody publishes a live count of leaked keys: GitHub and the companies that scan it each see their own slice and report it once a year. So the counters take GitGuardian's measured figures for 2025 from The State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 (1,275,105 AI-service secrets, up 81% in a year, and 28.65 million secrets in all, up 34%) and run those rates forward from 1 January. Leaks have grown every year, so the real figures are very likely higher. Without JavaScript the page shows the measured 2025 figures instead.

More sources, not just one

A counter built on one report is only as good as that report, so the tally now sits above five findings from other researchers, each linked to its source:

• GitHub counted more than 39 million secrets leaked across GitHub in 2024, public and private repositories together.
• GitGuardian re-tested the secrets it had found valid in 2022. In January 2026, more than 64% still worked.
• GitGuardian also found 24,008 secrets in MCP configuration files on public GitHub in 2025, and 2,117 of them were live. These are the files that connect AI agents to tools, often written by hand and committed by mistake.
• Truffle Security found 2,863 live Google API keys in public web pages that quietly gained access to Gemini once their projects enabled it. Keys that had been safe to publish for years became AI credentials overnight.
• Researchers at Stanford and UC Davis, in a paper for ACM CCS 2026, found 1,748 valid keys for 14 services, including cloud and payment providers, across 10 million websites. Many stayed exposed for months or years, and most of the JavaScript exposures existed only in the compiled bundle, not in the source code a developer would review.

We will add sources as they are published, and update the rates when the next State of Secrets Sprawl report arrives, usually in March.

The number that matters most

The 64% is the one to dwell on. A leak is an accident. A leaked key that still works four years later is a decision nobody got round to making. Replacing a key is rarely hard in itself. What stops people is finding every place the old one was used (the .env on the server, the CI secret, the config in a container, the copy on a colleague's laptop) and the fear of breaking one of them.

That is the job KeyRotate was built for. It keeps your keys in the macOS Keychain behind Touch ID and knows which files and apps use each one. When you replace a key it updates all of them, and it leaves the old key working until nothing needs it. Its Guard screen watches the places keys actually leak from, such as AI tool logs, repository history and web roots, and keeps warning until a leaked key is rotated. We wrote about that in An alarm bell for leaked keys.

Where FrontierStack fits

FrontierStack pairs with KeyRotate, so when a key is rotated the new one reaches FrontierStack over a pinned, signed connection to your own Mac. And when an AI agent working through FrontierStack sees a credential exposed in a log or a chat, it is told to tell you and offer to rotate it. With your OK, FrontierStack asks KeyRotate to do it, so every file KeyRotate looks after gets the new key as well.

See the counter on the KeyRotate page.