SecretScanner VS git-secrets

SecretScanner

In this release, we’ve integrated the open source project called SecretScanner into ThreatMapper so that now you can scan for both vulnerabilities and secrets in production, assess the risks associated across all potential issues, and then prioritize remediation accordingly.

In addition to Vulnerabilities, secrets form an important part of your attack surface. Leakage of secrets can put your organization into serious security risk. Our SecretScanner tool will help you to reduce your attack surface and protect your infrastucture. Check out our blog more more details.

We have also released an open source tool SecretScanner to scan container images and hosts for finding any potential secrets automatically before deploying your cloud native workloads.

Well, this doesn't really happen at places that don't suck. They had no least privilege access to critical secrets and no processes (like pre-commit hooks using git-secrets) to prevent them being committed.

# macOS brew install git-secrets # Linux git clone https://github.com/awslabs/git-secrets.git cd git-secrets make install

You could use Git hooks to prevent someone from being able to author a commit when you suspect there is a secret being committed. In addition to this, you could also perform this check server-side, in case someone did not run their Git hooks for whatever reason. For example, check out git-secrets.

git-secrets

Install git-secrets. Go into each of your repos, scan for past mistakes, and add a git-commit hook:

I agree that code scanning is really important, the best way to convince others is to identify high-risk threats in source code and present them to the decision-makers. For example, scanning Secrets is great for showing how repositories can be a massive vulnerability and identifying some low-hanging fruit, especially in the git history. Attackers are really after git repository access for this reason and there are plenty of open-source or free tools that you can use to illustrate the problem. Git-Secrets, Truffle Hog. These aren't great for a long-term commercial solution, something like GitGuardian is a better commercial tool but if the goal is just to illustrate the problem then finding some high-value secrets with free tools is a good way to convince the security personnel to invest in some solutions. Then the door is open to having more conversations as you have already proven the risk.

I worked for a big startup last year and was on a contract deadline for integrating a vendor framework into a React Native app.

It was taking too long to get a new temp demo license key and GitHub search with clever filters helped me track down a demo key that was recently uploaded to a test repo.

This is also why I use git-secrets in my repos.

https://github.com/awslabs/git-secrets

Under the covers, it is simply looking up an 'ignore' list stored in YML during each scan. If you are building your own, you might also want to see how AWS Labs is doing it in their solution git secrets.