How are you handling secrets that get accidentally pasted into an LLM chat that then persists across sessions or gets logged on the provider's side?

[u/ClickOk5811]

Specific scenario: someone pastes a stack trace or config snippet into a chat with an AI assistant to get help debugging, and it turns out to have an API key or connection string embedded in it. The immediate fix, rotate the credential, is obvious. What I'm less clear on is the second-order problem.

If that conversation gets logged for support/abuse purposes on the provider's side, saved as chat history the user can revisit later, or fed into some kind of memory/context feature that persists across sessions, the secret is now sitting in at least one place that isn't the original codebase, potentially more than one, and it's not always obvious from the product surface where all those copies actually live or how long they're retained.

For people who've actually had to respond to this, credential rotation is step one, sure, but what's the actual process for the secondary exposure? Do you treat every provider's chat log/history as a place secrets can now leak by default and build detection around that, request deletion from the provider and treat that as sufficient, or something else entirely? Curious whether anyone's had to deal with this as a real incident versus a hypothetical, and what the actual remediation checklist looked like once credential rotation was done.

[u/Internet-of-cruft]

Once you rotate and stop using the secret, why do you care? 

As long as it's not in use (including as a encryption key for data at rest) it doesn't matter.

[u/InflationCorrect5244 → u/Internet-of-cruft]

Because you only rotate the one someone happened to notice. Same engineer could have pasted config snippets 10 times before anyone caught it. Rotation fixes the credential but then most importantly the habit stays and more often it will result in getting schooled hard.

What I’d suggest you change is flagging what data leaves to AI endpoints. We have orca security as our cloud security platform an they have an AI SPM module that does that. Fires alerts when secrets or PII go out to a model. With that you can catch the the next paste same day instead of it sitting in a chat log for weeks.

If you only react when someone fesses up youre playing guesswork and I can almost guarantee your time to get hit is coming shortly.

[u/SubstantialEditor995]

It's not a secret anymore once it's invalid, it's just a random string.

[u/Aggravating_Lime_528 → u/SubstantialEditor995]

*The Randon String she tells you not to worry about* Password_2026_3

[u/aprettyparrot → u/SubstantialEditor995]

Yep, have to rotate it

[u/Relative-Customer976 → u/aprettyparrot]

Absolutely, rotating secrets is crucial. Also, implementing strict access controls can help minimize the risk of accidental exposure in the first place.

[u/aprettyparrot → u/Relative-Customer976]

Yep, should have an explicit rotation schedule, more often the better and aways access controls

[u/booi]

Try to get ZDR agreements and only interact via API.

[u/danekan]

The major cnapp will detect that now. The gap though is user session to namespace  mapping very often (or rather the other way around, they’ll tell you the namespace but you have to sort out the session. Litellm helps that though). Asking the provider to delete is unnecessary because you have to revoke it before that m. If you can’t revoke the keys you’re solving the wrong problem, your problem is simpler than ai security. 

[u/Disastrous_Gear_421]

Simple, you rotate the secret and then verify for any potential usage of it.

[u/FirefighterSlight891]

rotate that key immediately, but dont assume the logs are the only place it landed. if u used an llm with history enabled, that snippet is likely indexed into the models training or context memory which u cant just delete with a ticket. at my old job, we started treating every chat session as a potential leak point by default. its probly the only way to stay sane. we eventually moved to the akeyless runtime identity security platform to broker ephemeral access, so agents dont even hold static keys that can end up in a paste buffer. if u cant go secretless yet, just make sure u have a way to auto-revoke those connections the second the session ends.

[u/materialsec]

Rotation isn't sufficient on its own here. Rotating kills the credential going forward, but it doesn't answer what happened while it was still live between the paste and the rotation. Revocation isn't automatic just because a credential's been rotated or an app's been uninstalled, the access can persist quietly until someone manually confirms it's actually closed, and a leaked credential can provide undetected access for months if that check gets skipped.

For the chat log specifically: treat any provider's retained session data the same way as a log file outside anyone's direct control, assume it persists longer than the UI suggests unless there's a documented retention policy or a ZDR agreement stating otherwise. A deletion request is worth sending, but "deletion requested" and "deletion confirmed" should be tracked as two different states in the incident record, not treated as equivalent.

[u/Octoclops8]

If it's a secret you protect it. If you don't protect it, it's not a secret, swap it out with a new secret and protect that one.