I think this is a great example of temporarily effective "security through obscurity." It's also a trick that will only continue to work so long as it doesn't get adopted too widely.
It buys you time. I had my Anthropic key on Northflank set as an env var as-is and only found out about the incident from the HN front page 6 hours later (I didn't even get an email).
I rushed to the Claude platform console and was expecting to see a 4 figure usage bill or something. Luckily there was no usage.
But imagine if I were traveling. Even a rot13 of the key would've bought me enough time to rotate.
2 lessons:
- don't name your env var "CLAUDE_API_KEY". Call it "ARG_1" or something
- at least do some obscurin' so that the value doesn't start with "sk-ant..."
At this point, I kinda feel like the obscurity is our best mechanism for mitigation :(
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Give it about a week until AI agents add his "tip" to their training...