In most cases, trust boundaries are violated when a secret is exposed in a source code repository or an uncontrolled deployment environment.
Unintended people who don’t need to know the secret might get access to it. They might then be able to use it to gain unwanted access to associated
services or resources.
The trust issue can be more or less severe depending on the people’s role and entitlement.
What is the potential impact?
A reCaptcha secret key is a unique token that is used to verify the authenticity of reCaptcha requests made from an application to the reCaptcha
service. It is a key component in ensuring CAPTCHAs challenges issued by the application are properly solved and verified.
If a reCaptcha secret key leaks to an unintended audience, attackers with access to it will be able to forge CAPTCHA responses without solving
them. It will allow them to bypass the CAPTCHA challenge verification.
This can lead to an influx of spam submissions, automated attacks, or unauthorized access attempts depending on the feature the CAPTCHA mechanism
is intended to protect.
