GitHub personal access token

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This SIT is also included in the All credentials bundled SIT.

Format

A combination of 40 characters consisting of letters, digits, and special characters.

or

Paired username and password used in URL.

or

A combination of 40 characters consisting of letters and digits.

Pattern

  • A token prefix (case-sensitive) 'ghp_', 'gho_', 'ghu_', 'ghs_', or 'ghr_'
  • Any combination of 36
  • a-z (not case-sensitive) or 0-9

for example:

ghp_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCD012345

or

Various URL username and password formats for example:

https://username:********@contoso.com/

ftp://username:********@contoso.com:20/

or

A combination of 40 characters:

  • a-f or A-F (case-sensitive) or 0-9

for example:

abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef01

Credential example

pat=ghp_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCD012345

Checksum

Yes

SITs that have checksums use a unique calculation to check if the information is valid. This means when the Checksum value is Yes, the service can make a positive detection based on the sensitive data alone. When the Checksum value is No additional (secondary) elements must also be detected for the service to make a positive detection.

Keyword Highlighting

Supported

When keyword highlighting is supported in the contextual summary for a sensitive information type or a trainable classifier, in the Contextual Summary view of activity explorer, the keywords in a document that were matched to a policy are highlighted.

Definition

This SIT is designed to match the security information that's used as an alternate password for authentication to GitHub when using GitHub API or the command line.

It uses several primary resources:

  • Patterns of Identifiable GitHub PAT.
  • Patterns of User Login Credentials in URL.
  • Patterns of Hex encoded 160 bits Symmetric Key.
  • Patterns of CredentialName, CredentialFeatures, AccountIdentityName, AccountIdentityValue, ResourceType, ResourceName.
  • Patterns of mockup values, redactions, and placeholders.

The patterns are designed to match actual credentials with reasonable confidence. The patterns don't match credentials formatted as examples. Mockup values, redacted values, and placeholders, like credential type or usage descriptions, in the position where an actual secret value should present won't be matched.

Keywords

Keyword_GitHubPatIdentifiableSecret:

  • gh_

Keyword_LoginCredentialsInUrl:

  • ://

Keyword_SymmetricKey160Hex:

  • token