truffleHog – Search Git for High Entropy Strings with Commit History

Last updated: December 2, 2019 | 8,175 views

truffleHog is a Python-based tool to search Git for high entropy strings, digging deep into commit history and branches. This is effective at finding secrets accidentally committed.

truffleHog previously functioned by running entropy checks on git diffs. This functionality still exists, but high signal regex checks have been added, and the ability to surpress entropy checking has also been added.

1	truffleHog --regex --entropy=False https://github.com/dxa4481/truffleHog.git

1	truffleHog file:///user/dxa4481/codeprojects/truffleHog/

truffleHog will go through the entire commit history of each branch, and check each diff from each commit, and check for secrets. This is both by regex and by entropy. For entropy checks, it will evaluate the shannon entropy for both the base64 charset and hexidecimal charset for every blob of text greater than 20 characters comprised of those character sets in each diff. If at any point a high entropy string >20 characters is detected, it will print to the screen.

Using truffleHog to Search Git for High Entropy Strings

usage: trufflehog [-h] [--json] [--regex] [--rules RULES]
                  [--entropy DO_ENTROPY] [--since_commit SINCE_COMMIT]
                  [--max_depth MAX_DEPTH]
                  git_url

Find secrets hidden in the depths of git.

positional arguments:
  git_url               URL for secret searching

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --json                Output in JSON
  --regex               Enable high signal regex checks
  --rules RULES         Ignore default regexes and source from json list file
  --entropy DO_ENTROPY  Enable entropy checks
  --since_commit SINCE_COMMIT
                        Only scan from a given commit hash
  --max_depth MAX_DEPTH
                        The max commit depth to go back when searching for
                        secrets
  -i INCLUDE_PATHS_FILE, --include_paths INCLUDE_PATHS_FILE
                        File with regular expressions (one per line), at least
                        one of which must match a Git object path in order for
                        it to be scanned; lines starting with "#" are treated
                        as comments and are ignored. If empty or not provided
                        (default), all Git object paths are included unless
                        otherwise excluded via the --exclude_paths option.
  -x EXCLUDE_PATHS_FILE, --exclude_paths EXCLUDE_PATHS_FILE
                        File with regular expressions (one per line), none of
                        which may match a Git object path in order for it to
                        be scanned; lines starting with "#" are treated as
                        comments and are ignored. If empty or not provided
                        (default), no Git object paths are excluded unless
                        effectively excluded via the --include_paths option.