Secret hiding exposes the secret?

[arodland]

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I have a repository secret that has the value upload. The word "upload" isn't really a secret, it's the name of a key in a keystore. But the keystore and the keystore password are secrets, and it was easier to keep all three together — I didn't expect any problem from that.

But since adding that secret, my Actions logs, including the publicly-viewable versions that only show step names, are full of references to actions/***-artifact@v7, because Actions runs on my repo now consider "upload" a secret word that needs to be censored at all costs.

The goal is noble, but in this case I think it's an error of judgment. By censoring the secret value in a place that has a well-known value that couldn't possibly have been derived from the secret, it's leaking the fact that I have a secret with that value to the world. Harmless this time, but maybe not every time.

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[atokim4]

Yeah, the masker is just a string replace over the log output. It has no idea where a word came from, so any secret that's a common word ends up as *** all over the place, and like you said that kind of tells people what the value is.

The easy way out is to keep the key alias as a variable instead of a secret (Settings > Secrets and variables > Actions > Variables tab) and read it as ${{ vars.KEY_ALIAS }}. Variables aren't masked, and an alias doesn't need to be secret anyway. Keep only the keystore and its password as secrets. Once the upload secret is deleted, new runs stop censoring it.

The docs mention this too, in a way: they say not to use structured data as a secret value, since the masker only matches exact strings. Short or common values have the opposite problem and get matched way too often.

[KiranJITdesign]

This is an interesting security concern. GitHub could improve this by introducing a Configurable Secret Masking feature.

A practical implementation could include:

1. Exact-value masking: Mask only the exact secret value rather than every occurrence of common words or substrings.
2. Masking controls: Allow repository administrators to review and configure how individual secrets are masked.
3. Safe logging: Avoid replacing matching text in public workflow metadata, such as action names and step references, when it is not an actual secret exposure.
4. Masking preview: Show administrators where a secret value may be masked before saving it.

This would reduce false positives while preserving protection against accidental secret exposure. It would also help prevent secret masking from unexpectedly revealing information about repository configuration.