Security researchers at Truffle Security have identified 768 actively authenticating AWS access keys in public code repositories that grant full administrative control over corporate cloud accounts, including 526 root keys and 242 IAM users with AdministratorAccess permission.
The findings, published August 21, 2026, stem from a four-year audit of credential exposure across GitHub repositories, Hugging Face datasets, Docker images, package registries, and CI/CD logs. Truffle Security re-verified 10,616 leaked AWS key pairs on August 10 and found that 88 percent still authenticated successfully, with the median leaked key being five years old and never rotated.
Hugging Face Identified as Largest Source
Hugging Face emerged as the single biggest source of leaked AWS credentials, with 8,482 unique key exposures found across 3,394 public datasets. Root credentials accounted for 17.9 percent of the total. Many affected datasets contained copies of public source code collected for AI training and development, creating a persistent exposure problem where a single committed credential propagates across data archives, models, and containers downloaded by thousands of users.
Of the 64,024 unique AWS key pairs Truffle Security extracted from 431,875 public findings, 10,625 were root credentials representing 16.6 percent of the total. A root access key is among the most severe AWS security failures because it cannot be constrained by IAM permissions, granting the holder the ability to modify security controls, access billing, create users, and delete resources.
130 Keys on Organization Management Accounts
Among the most alarming findings were 130 live root keys associated with AWS Organizations management accounts. These sit at the top of a corporate AWS hierarchy and control every subordinate account beneath them. A single compromised management key could potentially affect every AWS account an organization runs.
The research also revealed widespread failure to rotate credentials. Of 2,903 keys where creation dates could be determined, only 398 had a newer credential associated with the same IAM user. That means roughly 86 percent had never been superseded or removed. The oldest identified key was 17.4 years old. Only 25 keys were created in the 30 days before the audit, suggesting the risk is driven primarily by forgotten credentials rather than recent mistakes.
Truffle Security found that 929 active IAM user keys were subject to the AWSCompromisedKeyQuarantine policy, which AWS applies when it detects public exposure. Of those, 112 used an older version of the quarantine that AWS stopped issuing in 2023, meaning the keys had likely been flagged years earlier yet still authenticated.
AWS responded that it notifies affected customers whenever it becomes aware of exposed keys. Truffle Security said its testing was limited to read-only metadata and that all identifiable owners were notified. However, the actual exploitation rate of the 768 admin-level keys remains unknown. A five-year-old root key sitting in a public Hugging Face dataset has had ample time to be discovered by parties other than researchers.
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