ere's a question that sounds trivial until you think about it carefully. Are these two lines of code equally dangerous? checksum = " d8e8fca2dc0f896fd7cb4cb0031ba249 " password = " d8e8fca2dc0f896fd7cb4cb0031ba249 " Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode The string value is identical. The entropy is identical. Every character-level feature is identical. A regex scanner treats them the same. A pure entropy scanner treats them the same. A human security engineer does not treat them the same — not even slightly. The first is almost certainly a file integrity hash. The second is almost certainly an exposed credential. The only difference is the four characters before the equals sign. When I trained my secrets detector and examined the feature importances, the variable name risk score came out at 0.28 — higher than Shannon entropy, higher than all character distribution features, higher than string length. The single most predictive signal for whether a string is a secret is not the string itself.…