Enabling scanning for AI-detected secrets

You can enable scanning for AI-detected secrets for your repository or organization. Alerts for generic secrets found using AI, such as passwords, are displayed in a separate list on the secret scanning alerts page.

Who can use this feature?

Repository owners, organization owners, security managers, and users with the admin role

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Enabling scanning for AI-detected secrets

To use scanning for AI-detected secrets, an enterprise owner must first set a policy at the enterprise level that controls whether the feature can be enabled and disabled for repositories in an organization. This policy is set to "allowed" by default.

You can enable scanning for AI-detected secrets in the security settings page of your repository or organization.

Note

You do not need a subscription to GitHub Copilot to use scanning for AI-detected secrets. The feature is available to repositories owned by organizations and enterprises with GitHub Secret Protection enabled.

Enabling scanning for AI-detected secrets for your repository

  1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.

  2. Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.

    Screenshot of a repository header showing the tabs. The "Settings" tab is highlighted by a dark orange outline.

  3. In the "Security and quality" section of the sidebar, click Advanced Security.

  4. Under "Secret Protection", to the right of "Scan for AI-detected secrets", click Enable.

Enabling scanning for AI-detected secrets for your organization

You must configure scanning for AI-detected secrets for your organization using a custom security configuration. You can then apply the security configuration to all (or selected) repositories in your organization.

  1. Create a new custom security configuration, or edit an existing one. See Creating a custom security configuration.
  2. When creating the custom security configuration, ensure that "Secret Protection" is set to Enabled, and that the dropdown menu for "Scan for AI-detected secrets" is also set to Enabled.
  3. Apply the custom security configuration to one or more repositories. For more information, see Applying a custom security configuration.

For information on how to view alerts for generic secrets that have been detected with AI, see Viewing and filtering alerts from secret scanning.

Further reading