Why do LLM keys all start with sk?

3 points by swaraj 35 days ago | 5 comments

Genuinely curious, as a builder for so long, API keys took all shapes and sizes, but what's with the sk prefix these days?

benoau 35 days ago |

I think Stripe started it long ago with "pk_" and "sk_" prefixes for public key and secret key.

fragmede 35 days ago | |

Fun fact! They weren't always prefixed. And then after someone spent hours pouring over the logs in Splunk, that's when they had the idea of prefixing then.

swaraj 35 days ago | |

that's actually a great reason / explanation. TY

Terr_ 35 days ago |

I assume it's loose convention intended to identify the string as "Secret Key", as a hint to the humans who might be moving the data around, and maybe to make it easier to write precautionary code like "hey it looks like your commit has a secret key in it, are you sure you want to push it?"

swaraj 35 days ago | |

this is actually a great idea + reason