TruffleHog Find leaked credentials.

:mag_right: Now Scanning

...and more

To learn more about TruffleHog and its features and capabilities, visit our product page.

:globe_with_meridians: TruffleHog Enterprise

Are you interested in continuously monitoring Git, Jira, Slack, Confluence, Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint (and more) for credentials? We have an enterprise product that can help! Learn more at .

We take the revenue from the enterprise product to fund more awesome open source projects that the whole community can benefit from.

What is TruffleHog 🐽

TruffleHog is the most powerful secrets Discovery, Classification, Validation, and Analysis tool. In this context, secret refers to a credential a machine uses to authenticate itself to another machine. This includes API keys, database passwords, private encryption keys, and more.

Discovery 🔍

TruffleHog can look for secrets in many places including Git, chats, wikis, logs, API testing platforms, object stores, filesystems and more.

Classification 📁

TruffleHog classifies over 800 secret types, mapping them back to the specific identity they belong to. Is it an AWS secret? Stripe secret? Cloudflare secret? Postgres password? SSL Private key? Sometimes it's hard to tell looking at it, so TruffleHog classifies everything it finds.

Validation ✅

For every secret TruffleHog can classify, it can also log in to confirm if that secret is live or not. This step is critical to know if there’s an active present danger or not.

Analysis 🔬

For the 20 some of the most commonly leaked out credential types, instead of sending one request to check if the secret can log in, TruffleHog can send many requests to learn everything there is to know about the secret. Who created it? What resources can it access? What permissions does it have on those resources?

:loudspeaker: Join Our Community

Have questions? Feedback? Jump into Slack or Discord and hang out with us.

Join our Slack Community

Join the Secret Scanning Discord

:tv: Demo

docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD:/pwd" trufflesecurity/trufflehog:latest github --org=trufflesecurity

:floppy_disk: Installation

Several options are available for you:

MacOS users

brew install trufflehog

Docker:

Ensure Docker engine is running before executing the following commands:

    Unix

docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD:/pwd" trufflesecurity/trufflehog:latest github --repo https://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys

    Windows Command Prompt

docker run --rm -it -v "%cd:/=\%:/pwd" trufflesecurity/trufflehog:latest github --repo https://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys

    Windows PowerShell

docker run --rm -it -v "${PWD}:/pwd" trufflesecurity/trufflehog github --repo https://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys

    M1 and M2 Mac

docker run --platform linux/arm64 --rm -it -v "$PWD:/pwd" trufflesecurity/trufflehog:latest github --repo https://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys

Binary releases

Download and unpack from https://github.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog/releases

Compile from source

git clone https://github.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog.git
cd trufflehog; go install

Using installation script

curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog/main/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -b /usr/local/bin

Using installation script, verify checksum signature (requires cosign to be installed)

curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog/main/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v -b /usr/local/bin

Using installation script to install a specific version

curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog/main/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -b /usr/local/bin 

:closed_lock_with_key: Verifying the artifacts

Checksums are applied to all artifacts, and the resulting checksum file is signed using cosign.

You need the following tool to verify signature:

• Cosign

Verification steps are as follows:

1. Download the artifact files you want, and the following files from the releases page.

   • trufflehog_{version}_checksums.txt
   • trufflehog_{version}_checksums.txt.pem
   • trufflehog_{version}_checksums.txt.sig

2. Verify the signature:

   cosign verify-blob  \
   --certificate  \
   --signature  \
   --certificate-identity-regexp 'https://github\.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog/\.github/workflows/.+' \
   --certificate-oidc-issuer "https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com"

3. Once the signature is confirmed as valid, you can proceed to validate that the SHA256 sums align with the downloaded artifact:

   sha256sum --ignore-missing -c trufflehog_{version}_checksums.txt

Replace {version} with the downloaded files version

Alternatively, if you are using the installation script, pass -v option to perform signature verification. This requires Cosign binary to be installed prior to running the installation script.

:rocket: Quick Start

1: Scan a repo for only verified secrets

Command:

trufflehog git https://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys --results=verified

Expected output:

🐷🔑🐷  TruffleHog. Unearth your secrets. 🐷🔑🐷

Found verified result 🐷🔑
Detector Type: AWS
Decoder Type: PLAIN
Raw result: AKIAYVP4CIPPERUVIFXG
Line: 4
Commit: fbc14303ffbf8fb1c2c1914e8dda7d0121633aca
File: keys
Email: counter 
Repository: https://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys
Timestamp: 2022-06-16 10:17:40 -0700 PDT
...

2: Scan a GitHub Org for only verified secrets

trufflehog github --org=trufflesecurity --results=verified

3: Scan a GitHub Repo for only verified secrets and get JSON output

Command:

trufflehog git https://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys --results=verified --json

Expected output:

{"SourceMetadata":{"Data":{"Git":{"commit":"fbc14303ffbf8fb1c2c1914e8dda7d0121633aca","file":"keys","email":"counter \u003ccounter@counters-MacBook-Air.local\u003e","repository":"https://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys","timestamp":"2022-06-16 10:17:40 -0700 PDT","line":4}}},"SourceID":0,"SourceType":16,"SourceName":"trufflehog - git","DetectorType":2,"DetectorName":"AWS","DecoderName":"PLAIN","Verified":true,"Raw":"AKIAYVP4CIPPERUVIFXG","Redacted":"AKIAYVP4CIPPERUVIFXG","ExtraData":{"account":"595918472158","arn":"arn:aws:iam::595918472158:user/canarytokens.com@@mirux23ppyky6hx3l6vclmhnj","user_id":"AIDAYVP4CIPPJ5M54LRCY"},"StructuredData":null}
...

4: Scan a GitHub Repo + its Issues and Pull Requests

trufflehog github --repo=https://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys --issue-comments --pr-comments

5: Scan an S3 bucket for high-confidence results (verified + unknown)

trufflehog s3 --bucket= --results=verified,unknown

6: Scan S3 buckets using IAM Roles

trufflehog s3 --role-arn=

7: Scan a Github Repo using SSH authentication in Docker

docker run --rm -v "$HOME/.ssh:/root/.ssh:ro" trufflesecurity/trufflehog:latest git ssh://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys

8: Scan individual files or directories

trufflehog filesystem path/to/file1.txt path/to/file2.txt path/to/dir

9: Scan a local git repo

Clone the git repo. For example test keys repo.

$ git clone git@github.com:trufflesecurity/test_keys.git

Run trufflehog from the parent directory (outside the git repo).

$ trufflehog git file://test_keys --results=verified,unknown

To guard against malicious git configs in local scanning (see CVE-2025-41390), TruffleHog clones local git repositories to a temporary directory prior to scanning. This follows Git's security best practices. If you want to specify a custom path to clone the repository to (instead of tmp), you can use the --clone-path flag. If you'd like to skip the local cloning process and scan the repository directly (only do this for trusted repos), you can use the --trust-local-git-config flag.

10: Scan GCS buckets for only verified secrets

trufflehog gcs --project-id= --cloud-environment --results=verified

11: Scan a Docker image for only verified secrets

Use the --image flag multiple times to scan multiple images.

# to scan from a remote registry
trufflehog docker --image trufflesecurity/secrets --results=verified

# to scan from the local docker daemon
trufflehog docker --image docker://new_image:tag --results=verified

# to scan from an image saved as a tarball
trufflehog docker --image file://path_to_image.tar --results=verified

12: Scan in CI

Set the --since-commit flag to your default branch that people merge into (ex: "main"). Set the --branch flag to your PR's branch name (ex: "feature-1"). Depending on the CI/CD platform you use, this value can be pulled in dynamically (ex: CIRCLE_BRANCH in Circle CI and TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST_BRANCH in Travis CI). If the repo is cloned and the target branch is already checked out during the CI/CD workflow, then --branch HEAD should be sufficient. The --fail flag will return an 183 error code if valid credentials are found.

trufflehog git file://. --since-commit main --branch feature-1 --results=verified,unknown --fail

13: Scan a Postman workspace

Use the --workspace-id, --collection-id, --environment flags multiple times to scan multiple targets.

trufflehog postman --token= --workspace-id=

14: Scan a Jenkins server

trufflehog jenkins --url https://jenkins.example.com --username admin --password admin

15: Scan an Elasticsearch server

Scan a Local Cluster

There are two ways to authenticate to a local cluster with TruffleHog: (1) username and password, (2) service token.

Connect to a local cluster with username and password

trufflehog elasticsearch --nodes 192.168.14.3 192.168.14.4 --username truffle --password hog

Connect to a local cluster with a service token

trufflehog elasticsearch --nodes 192.168.14.3 192.168.14.4 --service-token ‘AAEWVaWM...Rva2VuaSDZ’

Scan an Elastic Cloud Cluster

To scan a cluster on Elastic Cloud, you’ll need a Cloud ID and API key.

trufflehog elasticsearch \
  --cloud-id 'search-prod:dXMtY2Vx...YjM1ODNlOWFiZGRlNjI0NA==' \
  --api-key 'MlVtVjBZ...ZSYlduYnF1djh3NG5FQQ=='

16. Scan a GitHub Repository for Cross Fork Object References and Deleted Commits

The following command will enumerate deleted and hidden commits on a GitHub repository and then scan them for secrets. This is an alpha release feature.

trufflehog github-experimental --repo https://github.com//.git --object-discovery

In addition to the normal TruffleHog output, the --object-discovery flag creates two files in a new $HOME/.trufflehog directory: valid_hidden.txt and invalid.txt. These are used to track state during commit enumeration, as well as to provide users with a complete list of all hidden and deleted commits (valid_hidden.txt). If you'd like to automatically remove these files after scanning, please add the flag --delete-cached-data.

Note: Enumerating all valid commits on a repository using this method takes between 20 minutes and a few hours, depending on the size of your repository. We added a progress bar to keep you updated on how long the enumeration will take. The actual secret scanning runs extremely fast.

For more information on Cross Fork Object References, please read our blog post.

17. Scan Hugging Face

Scan a Hugging Face Model, Dataset or Space

trufflehog huggingface --model  --space  --dataset 

Scan all Models, Datasets and Spaces belonging to a Hugging Face Organization or User

trufflehog huggingface --org  --user 

(Optionally) When scanning an organization or user, you can skip an entire class of resources with --skip-models, --skip-datasets, --skip-spaces OR a particular resource with --ignore-models, --ignore-datasets, --ignore-spaces.

Scan Discussion and PR Comments

trufflehog huggingface --model  --include-discussions --include-prs

18. Scan stdin Input

aws s3 cp s3://example/gzipped/data.gz - | gunzip -c | trufflehog stdin

:question: FAQ

• All I see is 🐷🔑🐷 TruffleHog. Unearth your secrets. 🐷🔑🐷 and the program exits, what gives?
  • That means no secrets were detected
• Why is the scan taking a long time when I scan a GitHub org
  • Unauthenticated GitHub scans have rate limits. To improve your rate limits, include the --token flag with a personal access token
• It says a private key was verified, what does that mean?
  • A verified result means TruffleHog confirmed the credential is valid by testing it against the service's API. For private keys, we've confirmed the key can be used live for SSH or SSL authentication. Check out our Driftwood blog post to learn more Blog post
• Is there an easy way to ignore specific secrets?
  • If the scanned source supports line numbers, then you can add a trufflehog:ignore comment on the line containing the secret to ignore that secrets.

:newspaper: What's new in v3?

TruffleHog v3 is a complete rewrite in Go with many new powerful features.

• We've added over 700 credential detectors that support active verification against their respective APIs.
• We've also added native support for scanning GitHub, GitLab, Docker, filesystems, S3, GCS, Circle CI and Travis CI.
• Instantly verify private keys against millions of github users and billions of TLS certificates using our Driftwood technology.
• Scan binaries, documents, and other file formats
• Available as a GitHub Action and a pre-commit hook

What is credential verification?

For every potential credential that is detected, we've painstakingly implemented programmatic verification against the API that we think it belongs to. Verification eliminates false positives and provides three result statuses:

• verified: Credential confirmed as valid and active by API testing
• unverified: Credential detected but not confirmed valid (may be invalid, expired, or verification disabled)
• unknown: Verification attempted but failed due to errors, such as a network or API failure

For example, the AWS credential detector performs a GetCallerIdentity API call against the AWS API to verify if an AWS credential is active.

:memo: Usage

TruffleHog has a sub-command for each source of data that you may want to scan:

• git
• github
• gitlab
• docker
• s3
• filesystem (files and directories)
• syslog
• circleci
• travisci
• gcs (Google Cloud Storage)
• postman
• jenkins
• elasticsearch
• stdin
• multi-scan

Each subcommand can have options that you can see with the --help flag provided to the sub command:

$ trufflehog git --help
usage: TruffleHog git [] 

Find credentials in git repositories.

Flags:
  -h, --help                Show context-sensitive help (also try --help-long and --help-man).
      --log-level=0         Logging verbosity on a scale of 0 (info) to 5 (trace). Can be disabled with "-1".
      --profile             Enables profiling and sets a pprof and fgprof server on :18066.
  -j, --json                Output in JSON format.
      --json-legacy         Use the pre-v3.0 JSON format. Only works with git, gitlab, and github sources.
      --github-actions      Output in GitHub Actions format.
      --concurrency=20           Number of concurrent workers.
      --no-verification     Don't verify the results.
      --results=RESULTS          Specifies which type(s) of results to output: verified (confirmed valid by API), unknown (verification failed due to error), unverified (detected but not verified), filtered_unverified (unverified but would have been filtered out). Defaults to all types.
      --allow-verification-overlap
                                 Allow verification of similar credentials across detectors
      --filter-unverified   Only output first unverified result per chunk per detector if there are more than one results.
      --filter-entropy=FILTER-ENTROPY
                                 Filter unverified results with Shannon entropy. Start with 3.0.
      --config=CONFIG            Path to configuration file.
      --print-avg-detector-time
                                 Print the average time spent on each detector.
      --no-update           Don't check for updates.
      --fail                Exit with code 183 if results are found.
      --verifier=VERIFIER ...    Set custom verification endpoints.
      --custom-verifiers-only   Only use custom verification endpoints.
      --archive-max-size=ARCHIVE-MAX-SIZE
                                 Maximum size of archive to scan. (Byte units eg. 512B, 2KB, 4MB)
      --archive-max-depth=ARCHIVE-MAX-DEPTH
                                 Maximum depth of archive to scan.
      --archive-timeout=ARCHIVE-TIMEOUT
                                 Maximum time to spend extracting an archive.
      --include-detectors="all"  Comma separated list of detector types to include. Protobuf name or IDs may be used, as well as ranges.
      --exclude-detectors=EXCLUDE-DETECTORS
                                 Comma separated list of detector types to exclude. Protobuf name or IDs may be used, as well as ranges. IDs defined here take precedence over the include list.
      --version             Show application version.
  -i, --include-paths=INCLUDE-PATHS
                                 Path to file with newline separated regexes for files to include in scan.
  -x, --exclude-paths=EXCLUDE-PATHS
                                 Path to file with newline separated regexes for files to exclude in scan.
      --exclude-globs=EXCLUDE-GLOBS
                                 Comma separated list of globs to exclude in scan. This option filters at the `git log` level, resulting in faster scans.
      --since-commit=SINCE-COMMIT
                                 Commit to start scan from.
      --branch=BRANCH            Branch to scan.
      --max-depth=MAX-DEPTH      Maximum depth of commits to scan.
      --bare                Scan bare repository (e.g. useful while using in pre-receive hooks)

Args:
    Git repository URL. https://, file://, or ssh:// schema expected.

For example, to scan a git repository, start with

trufflehog git https://github.com/trufflesecurity/trufflehog.git

Configuration

TruffleHog supports defining custom regex detectors and multiple sources in a configuration file provided via the --config flag. The regex detectors can be used with any subcommand, while the sources defined in configuration are only for the multi-scan subcommand.

The configuration format for sources can be found on Truffle Security's source configuration documentation page.

Example GitHub source configuration and options reference:

sources:
- connection:
    '@type': type.googleapis.com/sources.GitHub
    repositories:
    - https://github.com/trufflesecurity/test_keys.git
    unauthenticated: {}
  name: example config scan
  type: SOURCE_TYPE_GITHUB
  verify: true

You may define multiple connections under the sources key (see above), and TruffleHog will scan all of the sources concurrently.

S3

The S3 source supports assuming IAM roles for scanning in addition to IAM users. This makes it easier for users to scan multiple AWS accounts without needing to rely on hardcoded credentials for each account.

The IAM identity that TruffleHog uses initially will need to have AssumeRole privileges as a principal in the trust policy of each IAM role to assume.

To scan a specific bucket using locally set credentials or instance metadata if on an EC2 instance:

trufflehog s3 --bucket=

To scan a specific bucket using an assumed role:

trufflehog s3 --bucket= --role-arn=

Multiple roles can be passed as separate arguments. The following command will attempt to scan every bucket each role has permissions to list in the S3 API:

trufflehog s3 --role-arn= --role-arn=

Exit Codes:

• 0: No errors and no results were found.
• 1: An error was encountered. Sources may not have completed scans.
• 183: No errors were encountered, but results were found. Will only be returned if --fail flag is used.

:octocat: TruffleHog Github Action

General Usage

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  pull_request:

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout code
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
      with:
        fetch-depth: 0
    - name: Secret Scanning
      uses: trufflesecurity/trufflehog@main
      with:
        extra_args: --results=verified,unknown

In the example config above, we're scanning for live secrets in all PRs and Pushes to main. Only code changes in the referenced commits are scanned. If you'd like to scan an entire branch, please see the "Advanced Usage" section below.

Shallow Cloning

If you're incorporating TruffleHog into a standalone workflow and aren't running any other CI/CD tooling alongside TruffleHog, then we recommend using Shallow Cloning to speed up your workflow. Here's an example of how to do it:

...
      - shell: bash
        run: |
          if [ "${{ github.event_name }}" == "push" ]; then
            echo "depth=$(($(jq length