Developers generally like to share their code, and many of them do so by open sourcing it on GitHub, a social code hosting and collaboration service. Many companies also use GitHub as a convenient place to host both private and public code repositories by creating GitHub organizations where employees can be joined.
Sometimes employees might publish things that should not be publicly available, things that contain sensitive information or things that could even lead to direct compromise of a system. This can happen by accident or because the employee does not know the sensitivity of the information.
Gitrob is a command line tool that can help organizations and security professionals scan Github for sensitive files exposed in their repos. The tool will iterate over all public organization and member repositories and match filenames against a range of patterns for files, that typically contain sensitive or dangerous information.
How it Works
Looking for sensitive information in GitHub repositories is not a new thing, it has been known for a while that things such as private keys and credentials can be found with GitHub’s search functionality, however Gitrob makes it easier to focus the effort on a specific organization.
The first thing the tool does is to collect all public repositories of the organization itself. It then goes on to collect all the organization members and their public repositories, in order to compile a list of repositories that might be related or have relevance to the organization.
When the list of repositories has been compiled, it proceeds to gather all the filenames in each repository and runs them through a series of observers that will flag the files, if they match any patterns of known sensitive files. This step might take a while if the organization is big or if the members have a lot of public repositories.
All of the members, repositories and files will be saved to a PostgreSQL database. When everything has been sifted through, it will start a Sinatra web server locally on the machine, which will serve a simple web application to present the collected data for analysis.
You can download Gitrob here:
Or read more here – the author can be found on Twitter here @michenriksen.