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py/HardcodedCredentials misses common credential patterns and flags usernames.

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#21,620 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
python
Domain
security

Research direction

Start with the py/HardcodedCredentials rule and reproduce the API-key, URL-credential, username, and options examples from the issue. Read how the rule models credential patterns and propagates taint through the options dictionary. Done means the missing credential cases are detected without treating ordinary usernames as credentials, with coverage for the reported examples.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

acknowledged Python

Some patterns are missing, for example:

api_key = "sk-1234567890" # Missed: API key
db_url = "postgres://user:pass@host/db" # Missed: URL credentials

Second, I am not sure if the username is seen as a credential in a usual project, but this rule will flag the username.
This is beyond the definition in CWE-798 (
The product contains hard-coded credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key.)

USERNAME = "admin" # Flagged

I also found that the rule will lose the taint in the following case:

USERNAME = "road_runner"
PASSWORD = "insecure_pwd"
options = {"password": PASSWORD}

conn = client.connect(username=USERNAME, password=PASSWORD) # Flagged
log.debug("Options: %s", options) # Missing
conn = client.connect(options=options) # Still Missing
Dominant language
CodeQL
Stars
10.1k
Forks
2.1k
Avg merge
2d 16h
Merged PRs (30d)
143

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