JAZ - Git Repo Secret Scanning

blog post: https://blog.jonaylor.xyz/discover-hidden-secrets-in-git-repos-with-rust

Intro

With the growing importance of open source software and increasing usage of public code repositories like GitHub, it has become increasingly important to protect against accidental secret commiting. While it may seem that doing this is as easy as deleting a key file or removing an oauth token from a configuration file, the bittersweet fact about git is that it'll keep a history of that secret. By searching through the git commit logs, an attacker could find and exploit application secrets. This project set out to create an automated way to find secrets hidden in the git commit history.

Secrets Scanning

As of now we are scanning for the following secrets based off common regex patterns identifying them. More can easily be added once a regex pattern is developed to identify them.

1. Slack Token
2. RSA private key
3. (OPENSSH) private key
4. SSH (DSA) private key
5. SSH (EC) private key
6. PGP private key block
7. Facebook Oauth
8. Twitter Oauth
9. GitHub
10. Google Oauth
11. AWS API Key
12. Heroku API Key
13. Generic Secret
14. Generic API Key
15. Slack Webhook
16. Google (GCP) Service-account
17. Twilio API Key
18. Password in URL

Design

In each object contained in the object database, we scan through and look for regex patterns of common keys provided by an array. If any secrets are found, the script simply prints the secret type to the console and provides the object id.

Improvements

The following is a list of improvements that would be good to add for the future. In general they make JAZ better or easier to use.

• Threadpool
• Config file based scanning
• remote scanning
• better CI/CD
• automated GitHub repo scanning

Installation

From Source

~$ cargo build

This will build into the target directory under debug by default and under release if the project is built with cargo build --release

Arch

~$ yay -S jaz

MacOS

~$ brew install jaz

Cargo

~$ cargo install jaz

Execution

~$ ./jaz /path/to/repo

Results

We scanned common testing repositories for this sort of thing like Plazmaz/leaky-repo and dijininja/leakyrepo. In general JAZ found all or most of the secrets. In the case of dijininja/leakyrepo we found a lot of RSA private keys which is acceptable but technically is a misidentification. For Plazmaz/leaky-repo we find the majority of the keys although once again misidentify some.