All challenges
beginnergitsecurity~8 min4 rounds

You Pushed AWS Keys to a Public Repo

Live cloud keys just landed in a public GitHub repo. A teammate says delete the file and force-push. Defend what you do first.

the decision you defend

You just pushed a commit to a public GitHub repo that contains your AWS access keys. You notice five minutes later. A teammate says just delete the file and force-push. What do you do first, and why?

Sign in to startFree for everyone. Takes a few seconds.

the situation

You commit a quick fix and push to your team's public GitHub repo. Five minutes later you realize the commit includes a config file with a live AWS access key and secret.

context

The key belongs to an account with permissions to your S3 buckets and some compute. The repo is public and has a few forks. A teammate says: just delete the file, force-push to rewrite the commit, and we are fine.

How this challenge works

Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 4 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.