API Key Naming Standard?

As cloud-native infrastructure and DevOps continues to dominate the modern information technology landscape, API keys have become the credentialing standard for authenticating and authorizing entities. While this approach enables incredible flexibility and agility, it has also created a major security challenge when API keys are not managed or secured properly. Hardcoding usernames/passwords in code has been an ever-present security challenge, but with cloud, the stakes of leaking API keys are much higher, since even a single key accidentally published to a public Github repository can give a bad actor control over an entire cloud account or massive sensitive data repository.

I was listening to a recent episode of the terrific Defensive Security Podcast, and the topic came up about how proficient bad actors are getting at mining code repositories for API keys. If bad actors can easily discover API keys, what is keeping us from finding them before they are leaked? Could it be a lack of naming standards? In my time as an IT professional, I've worked with many API keys from many vendors, and I have yet to find a naming/format standard that could help identify and scrub keys before they ever leave a dev environment or dynamically as they are published to repositories.

If such a standard already exists, I would welcome insights from anyone in the comments. But if it doesn't exist, wouldn't we be in a better position to defend API keys if every one were formatted with a consistent plain-text prefix like "apikey_a4db08b7-5729-4ba9-8c08-f2df493465a1? At the risk of oversimplifying the challenge, an API key format standard would help empower data loss prevention tools, DevOps pipelines and GitHub/GitLab repositories to be gatekeepers for these sensitive credentials.

It seems that AWS uses such a convention, but if this were an IETF standard adopted by all cloud service providers and developers, I think this could be a significant step in the right direction towards protecting these critical credentials which, when mismanaged, too often result in catastrophe.