Beyond the Noise: Why Context Changes Everything in Secret Scanning

As a founder who's spent years in the trenches of enterprise security, I've watched the same painful cycle repeat itself at company after company. Security teams deploy secret scanners with the best intentions, only to find themselves drowning in a sea of alerts that paradoxically make them less secure, not more.

Earlier this week, we released Contextual Secret Scanning at Clutch. We did this not because the world needs another scanner (it doesn't), but because it needs to fundamentally rethink how we approach the problem of secret sprawl.

The Organizational Divide That Created This Mess

It was pretty clear to us from day one that the natural home for secret scanners is within a non-human identity platform. Using the term "secret" which is very generic, makes people forget it's actually a type of identity. Maybe it's the fault of the security org chart we've had for years that kept IAM and AppSec separate. Or perhaps because IAM existed for years, but with the advent of cloud computing we've seen more applications, hence more development and secrets in code, so we needed a team to secure the code. This created a separation between two teams that have to work together to mitigate this problem.

The result is subtle, yet very obvious when you take a closer look. We ended up with tools that find secrets, but can't understand them in the broader context of Identity and Access Management.

The False Promise of "Finding Everything"

The dirty secret about secret scanners is that they've created a new problem while solving an old one. Yes, they will find your exposed credentials (with a bunch of false positives along the way). And unfortunately, in a large enterprise, thousands of findings would be considered a small amount rather than an overwhelming number.

I recently spoke with a CISO at a Fortune 500 company who showed me their scanner results: ~47,000 potential secrets flagged across their codebase. Forty-seven thousand. His team of AppSec engineers was supposed to investigate each one to determine which posed real risk. At that scale, the tool that was meant to protect them had become their biggest operational burden.

While both open source and commercial tools exist in this space, neither has actually solved the fundamental problem. And frankly, if a secret scanner isn't leveraging an LLM, what can you expect? An LLM can easily understand the context of the code and recognize that while glpat-DEADBEEFCAFEBABE1234 might match the regex for GitLab Personal Access Tokens, it's actually not a real secret.

The fundamental flaw though is not in the detection, but in the complete absence of context. When a scanner flags an AWS access key in a three-year-old GitHub commit, it can't tell you:

• If it's a production credential or a throwaway test key
• What systems it can actually access
• Whether it's already been exploited
• Who owns it and how to reach them

Without this context, security teams are left playing a dangerous guessing game. They either investigate everything (which is impossible at scale), or ignore everything (which is catastrophically risky). Neither approach actually makes you more secure.

The Investigation Tax

Even when teams try to do the right thing and investigate every finding, they quickly discover that each "simple" secret requires an archaeological expedition. Finding an exposed database connection string triggers a cascade of questions: Which database? Which environment? Who created it? Is it still in use? What data does it grant access to?

I call this the "Investigation Tax". It's the hidden cost that turns every secret scanning alert into a multi-hour research project. And while teams are busy investigating stale test credentials from 2019, real threats slip through undetected.

What is Contextual Secret Scanning?

The breakthrough insight behind Clutch's Contextual Secret Scanning is that secrets don't exist in isolation; they're part of complex identity relationships that tell the complete story of risk.

When Clutch discovers a secret, it doesn't just flag it and walk away. It correlates that secret back to its source of truth using our proprietary Identity Lineage™ technology. Suddenly, that mysterious API key becomes a complete narrative: created by Saul from the payments team, stored the AWS Secrets Manager production vault, in the Prod vault in 1Password, and committed to code, actively used by an EC2 machine, writing data to an AWS S3 bucket.

This is not an incremental improvement in secret Scanning, it's a fundamental shift from detection to intelligence.

Identity Lineage™: The Missing Link in Secret Scanning

Our Identity Lineage™ capability maps the complete lifecycle and relationships of every non-human identity in your environment. When applied to secret scanning, this creates unprecedented visibility:

Origin Tracking: We know exactly where each secret came from, not just which repository, but which person created it, when, and for what purpose.

Current State Analysis: Beyond just detecting presence, we determine if secrets are live, what permissions they carry, and what resources they can access.

Usage Patterns: We track who's consumed each secret since exposure, revealing potential compromise indicators that traditional scanners miss entirely.

Blast Radius Mapping: Instead of guessing impact, we show you exactly what systems, data, and operations each exposed secret could affect.

The Difference Context Makes

Consider a real scenario from one of our early customers. Their previous scanner flagged a Stripe API key in a public repository. Traditional approach: create a ticket, investigate for hours, eventually discover it was a test key with no access to real transactions.

With Clutch's Contextual Secret Scanning: Immediate classification showed it was a live production key with full transaction access, recently used by their checkout service, created by a developer who left the company six months ago. Priority one incident, resolved in minutes instead of hours.

The difference wasn't better detection, it was instant, accurate context that enabled immediate, appropriate response.

Beyond Scanning: Intelligence

What we've built isn't really a secret scanner at all, it's a secrets intelligence capability that happens to include a secret scanning engine. This distinction matters, because it represents a fundamental shift in how we think about this problem.

Traditional scanners optimize for recall: find everything, let humans sort it out. But Contextual Secret Scanning optimizes for precision: find what matters, understand its true risk, and enable immediate action.

This approach eliminates false positive fatigue not by filtering out results, but by providing enough context to make every alert actionable. When you can see the complete story behind each secret, its origin, current state, usage patterns, and blast radius, prioritization becomes obvious rather than agonizing.

The Path Forward

Secret sprawl isn't going away any time soon. If anything, it's accelerating as development teams embrace more APIs, more cloud services, more integrations. The old approach of "scan everything, investigate everything" simply doesn't scale to modern enterprise complexity.

Contextual Secret Scanning represents a new paradigm: instead of finding more secrets, we're building more intelligence about the secrets we find. Instead of generating more alerts, we're providing the context that makes each alert immediately actionable.

The goal is not to eliminate all exposed secrets, that's impossible in a dynamic development environment. The goal is to ensure that when secrets are exposed, you can instantly understand their risk, and respond appropriately.

This week's release is just the beginning. We're not just solving secret scanning, we're reimagining how security teams can operate with complete visibility into their non-human identity landscape.

Because in the end, context isn't just nice to have. In enterprise security, context is everything.

Ready to see how Contextual Secret Scanning transforms your security operations? See it in action or learn more about Clutch's complete non-human identity security platform.