Researcher Finds 26,400 Working Cloud, AI Keys on Gitee

Independent researcher Ben Zimmermann scanned 7.25 million public Gitee repositories, China's largest code-hosting service, and recovered 26,400 cloud and AI credentials that still worked when tested against the services that issued them, The Hacker News reported.

The vendor breakdown is dominated by 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs, with 3,805 YouTube API keys, 3,170 DeepSeek keys, 1,489 keys for Zhipu's BigModel AI platform, and 1,348 OpenAI keys trailing. "By commit date, 12,242 of the credentials came from 2025, nearly half the total," the article reports. Zimmermann ran two open-source scanners against every repository's full commit history: "TruffleHog found 12,737 credentials that worked, and Kingfisher found 14,664."

One of the finds was "an active organization-admin credential for a major enterprise AI platform," which the article leaves unnamed. Zimmermann's advice to developers is unqualified: "Treat any key that has ever been in a public Gitee repository as exposed, and revoke it at the provider."

The disclosure path has holes. Zimmermann sent the vendors with the most exposed keys a list of their credentials, but he did not contact the developers who leaked them, and when he published he had not confirmed that any of the reported credentials had been revoked. Customers of Alibaba, DeepSeek, Zhipu or OpenAI whose keys sit in the file will hear from their issuer, or from no one at all.