WASHINGTON — The research team at Truffle Security Co. spent four years watching a problem get worse.
On Thursday, they published the results: 768 active AWS access keys with full control over corporate Amazon cloud accounts are sitting in public repositories right now, still working, still dangerous. The researchers found them by extracting and verifying 64,024 unique AWS credential pairs from across the internet. The number that should unnerve every chief information security officer is the median age of a live leaked key: 1,831 days, or roughly five years, suggesting that many of the companies affected don’t know they have a problem.
The biggest single source isn’t some obscure software repository. It’s Hugging Face.
The AI model-sharing platform, which has become essential infrastructure for machine learning research and commercial AI development, contained 8,482 unique active AWS key pairs spread across 3,394 datasets. Nearly 18 percent of those were root credentials — the most powerful type of AWS access, which can do anything to an account, including deleting its entire infrastructure. Hugging Face has become the inadvertent world’s largest publicly accessible corporate credential dump, mostly because developers upload datasets and model training scripts without removing the access keys embedded in their code.
Of the 10,616 keys Truffle Security re-verified with complete credentials — meaning a working access key ID paired with the corresponding secret — 88 percent still authenticated against AWS. The company identified 768 live keys capable of full company account control. That breaks down into 526 root access keys and 242 keys attached to IAM users with AdministratorAccess permission, which grants the same scope as root keys across the account.
The report, published by Truffle Security on Thursday, represents the most systematic audit of AWS credential exposure yet attempted. Across 431,875 public findings, researchers extracted and processed more than 64,000 unique key pairs. The scope of active exposure is significantly narrower — 10,616 keys with both components present and verifiable — but that narrower set is the alarming one: it represents companies whose credentials are both findable and functioning.
The rotation problem runs through everything. Truffle Security found that 86 percent of live leaked keys have never been rotated — meaning the original credential is still active years after it was inadvertently published. Only 25 of the 10,616 verified keys, less than one percent, were created within the last 30 days. The implication is that AWS key leaks, unlike some other credential types, don’t age out. They persist until someone deliberately deactivates them, and most organizations apparently never do.
One figure complicates the picture: 929 keys in the dataset were flagged with AWS’s own AWSCompromisedKeyQuarantine policy, which AWS applies automatically when it detects credentials in public repositories. The policy restricts what the key can do without fully deactivating it. That 929 represents the floor of what AWS already knows about — but it’s far below the 10,616 keys the researchers found functioning. The gap between what AWS has flagged and what’s actually out there is considerable.
The researchers found 130 live root keys on organization management accounts — accounts that sit at the top of a corporate AWS hierarchy and control all subordinate accounts beneath them. Those are the most catastrophic possible exposure: a single key with the ability to affect every AWS account an organization runs. Truffle Security also found that 976 of the leaked IAM users holding AdministratorAccess — 84 percent of those accounts — had not set up budget alerts, meaning there’s no automatic financial alarm to signal that something unusual is consuming cloud resources.
What Truffle Security doesn’t know — and what its report cannot answer — is whether any of the 768 active admin keys it found have already been used maliciously. The researchers verified that the credentials authenticate; they did not attempt to use them. The actual exploitation rate is unknown. A five-year-old admin key sitting in a public Hugging Face dataset has had a long time to be found by someone other than a security research firm.
AWS’s recommendation has been consistent for years: don’t create root access keys at all; use IAM roles with minimum necessary permissions instead; rotate credentials regularly. The Truffle Security findings suggest that advice, while correct, has not been broadly adopted. The mercenary spyware alerts Apple sent to iPhone users in 110 countries this week and the GTA 6 leak investigation by Take-Two both illustrate how difficult it is to contain credential and data exposure once it occurs. The AWS credential problem is different in one key respect: the credentials are not stolen. They were uploaded voluntarily, and most of them are still there.
The 817 companies whose credentials Truffle Security traced to specific organizations through the data embedded in the access key structures were not individually notified as part of the report. The research was disclosed to AWS, which adds it to its existing key-compromise detection tooling. What happens next, for most of the affected organizations, depends on whether anyone at those companies is looking at the right repositories.
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