For more than a decade, Google’s developer documentation has described these keys, identified by the prefix ‘Aiza’, as a mechanism used to identify a project for billing purposes. Developers generated a key and then pasted it into their client-side HTML code in full public view.
However, with the appearance of the Gemini API (Generative Language API) from late 2023 onwards, it seems that these keys also started acting as authentication keys for sites embedding the Gemini AI Assistant.
No warning
Developers might build a site with basic features such as an embedded Maps function whose usage was identified for metering purposes using the original public GCP API key. When they later added Gemini to the same project, to, for example, make available a chatbot or other interactive feature, the same key effectively authenticated access to anything the owner had stored through the Gemini API, including datasets, documents and cached context. Because this is AI, extracting data would be as simple as prompting Gemini to reveal it.
