A GitHub personal access token (PAT) is a credential and is therefore a type of value that secret scanning is designed to detect. GitHub supports patterns for GitHub-issued tokens and can generate secret scanning alerts when supported PAT formats are committed to repositories. GitHub also performs validity checks for certain GitHub tokens and can distinguish active from inactive credentials. SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and server-side request forgery are application vulnerabilities rather than exposed credentials; those issues are detected through code scanning tools such as CodeQL. The distinction is important: secret scanning looks for credentials, API keys, passwords, tokens, and similar sensitive values, whereas code scanning analyzes source code for insecure programming patterns. Therefore, only the GitHub PAT belongs to secret scanning.
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