Secrets In Output

Secrets in output

Two slips in two days, both in the ICC repo, both by an agent doing routine checks. On 18 September 2026 a Sonnet verification agent ran a bare npx supabase status and the local stack's keys went into its transcript. On 19 September the main session ran a loop over SUPABASE_* names with ${!v:-unset} to learn which were set, and the VALUES of an account-wide personal access token and another project's service-role key landed in the Claude Code transcript (the local ~/.claude/projects JSONL and whatever the desktop app syncs). Nothing in the library covered it; the handover convention "read the token into a shell variable without printing it" was prose. ICC LESSONS_LEARNED L-045.

The transcript is not a terminal that scrolls away. It is a file, it is synced, it is re-sent to the model on every later turn, and it outlives the session. Anything that reaches a tool result reaches all of that.

The rules

1. Presence and length, never the value. The only question a check may answer is "is it set, and how long is it".

   [ -n "$SUPABASE_ACCESS_TOKEN" ] && echo "SUPABASE_ACCESS_TOKEN set (${#SUPABASE_ACCESS_TOKEN} chars)" || echo "unset"
   

   if ($env:SUPABASE_ACCESS_TOKEN) { "set ($($env:SUPABASE_ACCESS_TOKEN.Length) chars)" } else { "unset" }
   

   Never a :- or - fallback on a secret (${X:-unset} prints X when it IS set, which is the case you were checking for), never echo $X, never a prefix (${X:0:6} is the value too).

2. Names, not values, when listing. env | cut -d= -f1, compgen -v | grep SUPABASE, Get-ChildItem Env: | Select-Object Name. A bare env, printenv, set, export -p, declare -p, Get-ChildItem Env: or [Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariables() prints every value on the machine, and piping it into grep prints the matching lines whole.

3. A .env file by its keys. cut -d= -f1 .env or grep -o '^[A-Z_]*=' .env answers "which keys are configured". cat .env, head .env, Get-Content .env, grep KEY .env and the Read tool on .env put the whole file in the transcript. .env.example is documentation and is fine.

4. Provider status and config commands are listings too. supabase status prints the stack's keys in its table and supabase status -o env prints them as KEY=value; capture it (eval "$(npx supabase status -o env)", or > "$TMP/status.env") or filter it (| grep -viE 'key|secret|token|jwt'). netlify env:list, vercel env pull, gh secret, az keyvault secret show, aws ssm get-parameter --with-decryption and stripe config --list belong to the same class: know what each prints before it runs.

5. An API response is untrusted output. A GET of a config endpoint can return the credentials it holds: the Supabase Management API's /config/auth answers 243 fields including smtp_pass, hook secrets and provider secrets. Never print a raw response. Parse it into a variable and print a named allowlist of the fields you need, as scripts/supabase-auth-config.mjs does. Verbose HTTP clients echo the request too: curl -v prints the Authorization header it sends.

6. Dry-run the output shape on a dummy value first. Before a command that prints anything derived from a secret, run it with the variable pointed at a known string (X=dummy-value-123) and read what comes out. If the dummy appears, the real one would have.

7. A value that must be used goes into a variable or a file the tool result never shows. Read it with X=$(cat file) or read -r X < file, pass it as a header or an env var to the process that needs it, and let only that process's non-secret output reach the transcript.

When it has already happened

Treat the value as exposed the moment it is in a tool result, whatever the permission mode and whoever was watching. Say so plainly in the same turn: which secret, which scope (a project key or an account-wide token), and where the transcript lives. Give the rotation steps for that provider. The owner decides whether to rotate; the record of the decision goes in the repo's lessons file with the line skill that should have prevented this: secrets-in-output.

The hook

hooks/secret-echo-guard.mjs (PreToolUse, Bash|PowerShell, plus Read for .env files) denies the command-string shapes above before they run and hands back the safe form in its reason. It is a deny, not an ask, because in a bypass-permissions session an ask is auto-approved and shown to nobody, and unattended is exactly where the slips happened. What the hook cannot see, this skill still owns: a value copied into another variable and printed (k=$KEY; echo $k), a script that prints process.env from its own source, and every API response.

Why

A secret in a transcript is not a near miss; it is a disclosure with an unknown audience, and the only cheap moment to prevent it is before the command runs. Presence-and-length costs nothing, answers the real question, and cannot leak. Evidence: ICC L-045 (19 September 2026), the 18 September Sonnet slip recorded in the same repo's 2026-09-18 handover entry.

Provenance and maintenance

Date stamp: 2026-09-20. Distilled from the two ICC incidents above; the hook's asserted cases are in hooks/secret-echo-guard.test.mjs (the two incident commands are its first two deny cases).