A good friend of mine recently left the organization I work for and the task of resetting our passwords and auditing credentials fell on me. Since we use Heroku for our development platform I needed to not only reset the credentials for the web portion (which conveniently also handles resetting the API key) but also revoke any SSH keys he may have added to access it.

Sadly Heroku does not seem to provide any web interface that I could find for examining what keys were associated with the account. Searching for this information also didn’t turn up very valuable results; most people were looking to add keys or resolve issues with missing keys rather than revoking them. I suspect not many people think of SSH keys when it comes time to revoke access which is a dire mistake.

I took to the command line to solve my issue as I knew you could list and add keys that way, so it was a minor leap of logic to assume they could revoke keys as well. I ran heroku help keys to get the syntax for the commands and was pleasantly surprised to see an additional option listed in there:

keys:clear       #  remove all authentication keys from the current user

As a now two person web-shop it’s not a terrible amount of work to add our keys back in and looking through there were already some keys in there that should have been revoked long ago. One command and our applications were safe from mischief, though I know my former associate wouldn’t abuse that privilege beyond perhaps pointing out the security flaw I’d allowed.