An independent researcher scanned 7.25 million public repositories on Gitee, China’s largest Git hosting platform, and found about 26,400 cloud and AI credentials that still worked. Ben Zimmermann’s findings, reported on October 28, include thousands of Alibaba Cloud keys and credentials for AI services such as DeepSeek, OpenAI and Zhipu AI.
26,400 Credentials Still Valid Across Gitee Repositories
Zimmermann validated the secrets he found against provider endpoints, which separates working credentials from stale strings. About 26,400 passed that test. A second account of the research puts the figure at 26,000.
Most of the credentials are cloud and AI keys. The largest single group is 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs. The affected services also include DeepSeek, OpenAI and Zhipu AI, among others.
Zimmermann Scanned 7.25 Million Public Gitee Repositories
The scan ran for about a month, according to the reporting, though the exact dates were not given. It covered 7.25 million public Gitee repositories. The research is independent and the reports do not describe it as tied to any vendor or platform request.
Zimmermann Notified Vendors but Not the Developers
Zimmermann sent the vendors with the most exposed keys their own lists. He did not contact the developers who leaked the credentials. At the time of publication he had not confirmed that the credentials were revoked, so the keys he validated may remain live.
The decision routes the cleanup through the providers, who can revoke keys on their side, rather than through the individual account holders who pushed the secrets to public repositories.
What Working Gitee Keys Allow Attackers to Access
Anyone who copied the keys could access the accounts and services they unlock. The scale of abuse is unknown, and the reporting identifies no victims who have suffered losses. The exposure is of keys that function today, which differs from a list of credentials that were once valid and have since expired.
Alibaba Cloud Keys Lead a Mixed Provider List
The prominence of Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs, at 9,473, reflects Gitee’s position as China’s largest Git hosting platform and the popularity of Alibaba’s cloud services among its developers. The reporting does not attribute the count to any specific cause beyond the platform’s user base.
AI service keys form the other major group in the findings. DeepSeek, OpenAI and Zhipu AI credentials appear alongside cloud keys, so the exposure spans both infrastructure access and model API usage.
Rotation as the Standard Remedy
The response described in the reporting is that vendors were notified and that developers should rotate any key ever pushed to a public repository. A key that appeared in a public repository at any point in its history counts as exposed, even if the developer later deleted the file, because copies may already exist.
The research leaves several matters unresolved. Zimmermann has not reported how many of the roughly 26,400 keys vendors have since revoked, whether any of the keys were already used by third parties, or how the figure compares with scans of other platforms. The count of validated, working credentials is the main new data point: it indicates that a large pool of live secrets sat in public view on a single platform at one time, and that the individuals who owned them had not been told.
Gitee Scan Leaves Revocation Status and Abuse Unconfirmed
Zimmermann’s method stands out because it tested credentials rather than only matching patterns in text. The validation against provider endpoints means the 26,400 figure counts keys that were live at the time of testing. What the scan cannot show is whether anyone else found the keys first.
The researcher gave vendors lists of the keys tied to their services, starting with those that had the most exposed keys, and did not tell the developers. At publication on October 28 he had not confirmed that any of the credentials had been revoked, and the dates of the month-long scan were not given.
