Review the impact of enabling Secret Protection, then click Enable Secret Protection. A repository administrator can choose to disable secret scanning for a repository at any time.

You can configure how GitHub scans your repositories for leaked secrets and generates alerts. You can enable secret scanning to detect additional potential secrets at the repository and organization levels.

Copilot secret scanning. Use AI to detect unstructured secrets like passwords, or to generate regular expressions for custom patterns. Validity checks help you prioritize which secrets to remediate first by verifying whether a detected secret is still active. When you enable validity checks, ...

Learn how to customize GitHub's secret leak detection tools.

February 25, 2026 - Secret scanning for your repository scans for any secrets that might already exist in your source code across history and push protection prevents any new secrets from being exposed in source code. GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps works with Azure Repos. To use GitHub Advanced Security with GitHub repositories, see GitHub Advanced Security. For more information about Advanced Security permissions, see Manage Advanced Security permissions. When you enable Advanced Security or Secret Protection specifically, it scans repositories for secrets issued by various service providers and generates secret scanning alerts.

If you have an older repository, you can turn on secret scanning by clicking on the "Enable" button in the secret scanning section of the page. When it comes to enterprise and organization permissions there are settings to automatically turn ...

March 22, 2025 - If you are an owner of an enterprise with GitHub Advanced Security, you can now enable secret scanning and push protection across your entire enterprise with only 1 click. This…

April 30, 2025 - GitHub Advanced Security customers using secret scanning can now use the REST API to enable or disable support for non-provider patterns at the enterprise level. This enables you to manage…

Enable secret scanning to identify plain-text credentials and prevent them from being written to your repository - skills/introduction-to-secret-scanning

Learn how to enable secret scanning to detect secrets that are already visible in a repository, as well as push protection to proactively secure you against leaking additional secrets by blocking pushes containing secrets.

Learn how to enable secret scanning to detect secrets that are already visible in a repository, as well as push protection to proactively secure you against leaking additional secrets by blocking pushes containing secrets.

If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings. In the "Security" section of the sidebar, click Advanced Security. Under "Secret Protection", to the right of "Non-provider patterns", click Enable.

When you enable Advanced Security, secret scanning may automatically be enabled for the repository due to the organization's settings. If "Secret scanning" is shown with an Enable button, you still need to enable secret scanning by clicking Enable.

If this returns the value 0, it means that the SSSE3 flag is available and enabled. You can now enable secret scanning.

Secret scanning scans your entire Git history on all branches present in your GitHub repository for secrets, even if the repository is archived. GitHub will also periodically run a full Git history scan for new secret types in existing content in public repositories where secret scanning is enabled when new supported secret types are added.

December 19, 2025 - Click on Enable GitHub Advanced Security for this repository. Once this is done, secret scanning will be automatically enabled for the organization’s public repository. If there is an ‘Enable’ button found beside the Secret Scanning feature, ...

When creating the custom security configuration, ensure that "Secret Protection" is set to Enabled, and that the dropdown menu for "Scan for generic secrets" is also set to Enabled.

March 22, 2025 - Enterprises with GitHub Advanced Security can now enable secret scanning and push protection on all their organizations using a single call to an enterprise-level REST API endpoint. You can also…

February 28, 2023 - As of today, GitHub secret scanning’s alert experience is generally available and free for all public repositories. You can enable secret scanning alerts across all the repositories you own to notify you of leaked secrets across your full repository history including code, issues, description, and comments.