Redact leaked HF and API tokens from Codex session traces
Session from build-small-agent-trace on Hugging Face by drdavidtang · MIT · condensed by Coders Talk
9msession
1interventions
GOAL
Find and permanently redact an accidentally exposed Hugging Face token (and any other API keys) from Codex chat session trace files spanning June 11-13, before those traces get shared.
- +0Prompt · +0I shared my HF token in the chat by accident — will it show up if I share these traces? Can you check the traces from June 11-13?
- +1mAgent did · +1mSearched project workspace for trace/log files and token patterns dated June 11-13; found no local trace files and no exposed tokens in the current codebase.
- +1mIntervention · +1mDeveloper pointed out the agent hadn't checked the real session history location.Why: you only looked in the project-local .codex folder, the actual chat history is in ~/.codex/sessions
- +1mAgent did · +1mLocated 12 real session JSONL files under ~/.codex/sessions for June 11-13 and scanned them, confirming 2 HF token occurrences on June 11 and 6 on June 13.
- +3mPrompt · +3mCan you redact all of those and any other API keys that might have been in the trace? I was also sending Codex on some .env work.
- +3mFail · +3mInitial inline shell command for inventorying secrets failed with a quoting error and made no changes.
- +3mAgent did · +3mWrote scripts/redact_codex_sessions.py to detect HF, OpenAI, GitHub, AWS, bearer, and .env-style secret patterns; ran it against the 12 session files with backups, then deleted the backups.
- +4mAgent did · +4mVerified via a follow-up scan that zero HF, OpenAI, GitHub, AWS, or bearer patterns remained across all 12 files; reported 9 HF tokens, 4 OpenAI-style keys, and 133 secret-like .env assignments redacted.
- +9mOutcome · +9m12 Codex session trace files redacted in place: 9 HF tokens, 4 OpenAI keys, and 133 secret-like .env assignments replaced with [REDACTED], conversations otherwise intact, unredacted backups deleted.
VERDICT
Next time I'd tell it upfront that Codex session history lives in ~/.codex/sessions, not just the project-local .codex folder — that's the correction that actually mattered here since the first pass found nothing. Once it knew where to look, writing a real redaction script instead of one-off shell commands was the right call and it verified its own work afterward.