You've locked down your AWS credentials. You've got secret scanning on your repos. You rotate your database passwords.
But LLM API keys? Those are sitting in plaintext in your pipeline — and nobody's rotating them.
LLM API keys exploded in the last two years. Every team has them now: OpenAI for the chatbot, Anthropic for the internal tool, Groq because someone read a benchmark. They get pasted into CI/CD workflows, hardcoded into Dockerfiles, committed in .env.example
with real values, echoed in build logs.
The usual secrets scanning tools weren't built for them. GitLeaks and TruffleHog have patterns for AWS and Stripe, but coverage for sk-ant-api03-...
or gsk_...
is inconsistent. And unlike a database password, a leaked LLM key doesn't crash your app — it just silently drains your quota and potentially exposes your prompts.
During a recent audit of a client's GitHub Actions setup, I found three LLM API keys across two workflows:
.env.staging
file committed "temporarily"All three were still live.
The hard part wasn't finding them — it was quickly assessing blast radius before writing the report. Which models do these keys unlock? Are they on a paid plan? What rate limits are attached? Writing provider-specific curl scripts for each one wastes time you don't have during an engagement.
I've been using CheckAPIs for this step. Paste the keys, get back:
Supports 12+ providers: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Groq, Mistral, Cohere, HuggingFace, Replicate, Together AI, Perplexity, Azure, AWS Bedrock.
The important part for client work: everything runs client-side. The validation calls go directly from your browser to the provider's API — no proxy, no logging, no third party ever sees the key.
curl -X POST https://checkapis.pages.dev/api/check \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"keys": ["sk-proj-...", "sk-ant-api03-..."]}'
Finding the key is step one. Here's the remediation checklist I hand off:
Immediate
Pipeline hardening
set +x
before any step that uses themDetection
LLM keys are credentials. They have blast radius: financial (quota drain), data (prompt/completion logs on the provider side), and reputational (your key used for abuse). Treat them exactly like you'd treat an AWS access key.
The tooling hasn't caught up yet — which means right now, in most orgs, they're the path of least resistance.
CheckAPIs is open source — github.com/Teycir/CheckAPI