AWS quarantines leaked keys. Truffle Security's sweep says 9,342 of them still work.

The policy Amazon applies when it spots a leaked key is meant to limit fraud-related damage without, in its own phrasing, impacting existing resources ^[7]. That second clause does most of the work. Writing in The Register, the cloud economist Corey Quinn reads the published policy and lists what a quarantined credential can still do: assume other roles in the account, run commands on running instances, stop CloudTrail logging, and delete the audit trail outright ^[8]. Quinn also notes that writing to a bucket is permitted, as is setting object lock and retention, so an attacker can fill storage and apply compliance-mode retention that nobody can shorten, AWS support included, without deleting the whole account ^[9].

That is one practitioner's reading of a document rather than a demonstrated attack ^[10], and it deserves that label. It is also checkable line by line against Amazon's own documentation, which makes it harder to dismiss than a proof of concept nobody else can reproduce.

Now the arithmetic of the sweep itself. Truffle Security could only fully test 10,616 of its 64,024 unique keys, or 16.6 percent of the corpus ^[2]. Inside that slice, 9,342 credentials still authenticated ^[1], and roughly 68 percent of the full-control finds were root keys rather than lesser IAM users ^[3]. The 768 figure is therefore a floor drawn from a sixth of the sample, not a census.

The rotation numbers are what make the quarantine policy load-bearing in the first place. Only 13.7 percent of users with an exposed key ever issued a newer one ^[6], which leaves 86.3 percent of that population with no successor credential at all ^[4]. A key with no replacement is a key that was never meant to be revoked, because revoking it breaks something.

The source mix is the part that should reallocate somebody's scanning budget. Hugging Face alone produced 8,482 unique key exposures, 13.2 percent of every distinct key in the study and the largest single origin ^[5][5]. TNW's framing is that model repositories have inherited the habits of software ones; the corpus also included Docker images and CI logs ^[4], which are not where credential hygiene programmes usually look.

All of which points at the same dependency. Quarantine only fires on keys Amazon detects as leaked ^[7]. The control that works without detection is rotation, and by Truffle Security's own count it is not happening.