Gitleaks

Gitleaks

Gitleaks is an open-source tool for detecting hardcoded secrets like passwords, API keys, and tokens in git repositories. It scans commit history and branch comparisons to find leaked keys that were committed accidentally.
Security & Privacy Secret Detection
Gitleaks image
secrets passwords api-keys tokens git
Gitleaks alternatives ➤

Gitleaks: Open-Source Secret Detection Tool

Gitleaks detects hardcoded secrets like passwords, API keys, and tokens in git repositories by scanning commit history and branch comparisons to identify accidentally leaked keys.

What is Gitleaks?

Gitleaks is an open source command line tool for detecting hardcoded secrets like passwords, API keys, and tokens in git repositories. It is used to find exposed credentials that were committed accidentally before they are exploited by outside actors.

Gitleaks scans git commit history, branches, and commit messages to detect secrets. It supports scanning of public and private git repos from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and more. The tool can scan shallow clones and single commits as well to optimize scans.

Once secrets are detected, Gitleaks logs the leaked credentials, generates a report, and can even commit fixes back to the repo to revoke the exposed secrets. It detects secrets via pattern matching, entropy checks, commit message scans, and more advanced detection mechanisms.

Gitleaks is useful for open source project maintainers, security engineers, developers, and DevOps teams to audit their own git repositories and identify exposed API keys, service credentials, SSH keys, access tokens, and other secrets before they can be abused by malicious actors.

Gitleaks Features

Features

  1. Scans git repos for secrets and keys
  2. Supports scanning unencrypted repos, local repos, archives, and commit diffs
  3. Configurable rules for detecting secrets based on regexes
  4. Integrates with CI/CD pipelines
  5. Generates JSON output

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Open source and free

Easy to install and use

Customizable rules for finding secrets

Scans entire commit history

Prevents accidental secret leaks

Cons

Only scans text content, not binary files

Can generate false positives

Requires some configuration for best results

CLI only, no GUI

Official Links

Official Website
https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks

The Best Gitleaks Alternatives

Top Security & Privacy and Secret Detection and other similar apps like Gitleaks

Here are some alternatives to Gitleaks:

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truffleHog
GitGuardian icon
GitGuardian
Gitrob icon
Gitrob
Repo-security-scanner icon
repo-security-scanner
Repo-supervisor icon
Repo-supervisor
Yara4pentesters icon
yara4pentesters
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