noseyparker VS leaky-repo

Yes!

Sometimes a file has no extension. Other times the extension is a lie. Still other times, you may be dealing with an unnamed bytestring and wish to know what kind of content it is.

This last case happens quite a lot in Nosey Parker [1], a detector of secrets in textual data. There, it is possible to come across unnamed files in Git history, and it would be useful to the user to still indicate what type of file it seems to be.

I added file type detection based on libmagic to Nosey Parker a while back, but it's not compiled in by default because libmagic is slow and complicates the build process. Also, libmagic is implemented as a large C library whose primary job is parsing, which makes the security side of me jittery.

I will likely add enabled-by-default filetype detection to Nosey Parker using Magika's ONNX model.

[1] https://github.com/praetorian-inc/noseyparker

Yes and no.

On the one hand, Nosey Parker is effectively a special-purpose `grep` with a bunch of security-relevant patterns built-in, including one for PEM-encoded keys: <https://github.com/praetorian-inc/noseyparker/blob/main/data...>

On the other hand, to naively run the check you describe, you would need access to a copy of all of GitHub, which isn't feasible.

What you can do with Nosey Parker is use its GitHub enumeration features to specify your GitHub organization and a list of GitHub usernames you are interested in, and scan against just those. This will implicitly list all the relevant public repositories, clone them, and scan their entire history.

For your use case, another thing you could do is use the new GitHub code search (<https://cs.github.com>) to regex search for particular keys or tokens. That new search seems to cover lots of the public content available on GitHub.

Also, to put some color on this use case: in offensive security engagements (aka "red team" engagements) at Praetorian, we frequently find leaked credentials or tokens on GitHub or elsewhere, which allow us deeper access into the client's systems. It's a significant problem.

A tool just got open-sourced called Nosey Parker that scans commits and git history for secrets. You could look at Nosey Parker's source code to see how they scan commits and design your tool based on that.

Also, I've built a repo of credentials and benchmarked several tools including trufflehog against it if you want to see how your tool and default ruleset stack up: https://github.com/Plazmaz/leaky-repo

At this point, we've succeeded at what we set out to create. I went ahead and scanned common testing repositories for this sort of thing like Plazmaz/leaky-repo and dijininja/leakyrepo. In general the program found all or most of the secrets. In the case of dijininja/leakyrepo it found a lot of RSA private keys which is acceptable but technically a misidentification. For Plazmaz/leaky-repo we find the majority of the keys although once again misidentify some. The decision to use rust makes performance really solid although still a little slow even for small repos. A couple good extensions to this to help with that could be adding a thread pool in order to scan objects in parallel. In more professional code, it seems more idiomatic for the scan_objects() function to return some objects of objects including their results rather than just printing the one containing secrets. For example, it could be formatted something like this: