2026-04-22 — PAT rotation after internal leak audit

What changed

• The GitHub Personal Access Token used by the local Claude Code harness was revoked and replaced.
• The new token was installed only in its two legitimate configuration locations (the GITHUB_PAT env in ~/.claude/settings.json and the mcpServers.github.env.GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN field in ~/.claude.json).
• Pre-cleanup backups of the settings files were removed once the new token was verified end-to-end.

Why

During the SSOT audit (#640), copies of the same token were found inside three allowedTools permission strings in ~/.claude/settings.local.json. Permission strings are not a secret-bearing surface — any value placed there must be assumed compromised. The token was rotated as a precaution; there is no evidence of external misuse.

Scope of this entry

Governance / operational hygiene. No user-facing behavior, no infrastructure, and no repository contents are changed by this rotation. The pr: field is null because the fix landed as a direct commit to main — the leaked value lived only in a local workstation config file, never in version control, so no code PR was appropriate.

Follow-ups

• The hard rule that secrets must never appear in allowedTools entries is captured in local agent memory and in the operations doc — no repo-side artifact is needed.
• If a post-merge audit flags this issue for lacking a changelog reference at close time, point it at this entry.