gitleaks VS git-secrets

install gitleaks in your machine gitleaks

> gitleaks : fatal error: runtime: out of memory

Should be fixed now: https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks/pull/1292. Thanks for highlighting this simple change I've been putting off :)

I work in IT and we're enhancing our 'Shift Left Security' approach to prevent sensitive data leaks in our GitHub repositories. We've customized Gitleaks to send git-related information (like remote repository, author details, commit hash etc.) to our backend after each commit. This setup helps us monitor Gitleaks usage among our developers. (gitleaks)

Cool. What features/capabilities are different compared to gitleaks?

To add my anecdote, testing out Trufflehog versus Gitleaks and detect-secrets the other tools seemed superior on detection rate and easier to work with.

Some tools to consider: Gitleaks - open-source secret scanner for git repositories, files, and directories. Retire.js - dependency check tool for client JS code. Censys - It’s a search engine that you can use, for example, to scan any IP address and check open ports, software versions, location of the servers, etc. If you want to check more tools, you can download this free ebook with a list of recommended security tools: https://brightinventions.pl/blog/app-security-free-ebook/ The listed tools are free or offer free trials.

bonuses: - https://github.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog - https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks

I GET IT I need to follow best practice and not upload any sensitive information, even if its a private repo. But through my 10 yeras of coding it happened twice. However these keys only lived in 2 areas: my laptop and GITHUB. My laptop is pretty secured, and the timing of the above events just make me really think someone internally at Github is running https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks on private repos he / she has access to.

Maybe https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks is what you are looking for

Gitleaks

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.