What am I looking at here?
There’s a string stating that the code should not be passed or the employee will be fired. I’d assume this was a test to see if an employee meant to be doing code review was actually doing them. Spoiler, they were not, as OP said they found this in production code.
I’d go a step further and I suspect it’s a peppering string (i.e. fixed string you add to hashes to defeat rainbow tables). I’d really hope it isn’t as you mentioned because gosh that sounds like a toxic workplace if someone is just leaving landmines around purely to get someone fired.
More like, you know damn well that Jim keeps passing code reviews without reading a line in them, he’s been talked to, still does it, and you need something actionable to prove it so that you can get someone’s ass in his chair who does their job.
My guess is a “solution” to the age-old problem of needing to store a secret in a file that the user can download, thus making the entire system insecure.
This “solution” appears to be either that the string itself is so outrageous that the user would not believe that it’s the real secret when it is in fact the real secret, leveraging security through obscurity, or else it’s there in place of the real secret that cannot be revealed under pain of death firing, and therefore is accidentally being used instead of that intended secret… so it’s not secret after all.
Unless they’re doing something incredibly clever to substitute that secret string for the real thing when the time is right and doing it in such a way that the user can’t intercept, someone’s getting fired.
