Talisman – detect sensitive data before Git commits

Talisman is a command-line security tool designed to stop sensitive information leaving a developer’s workstation through Git.

It examines outgoing changesets for material that looks suspicious, such as passwords, tokens and private keys, and is commonly used as a pre-commit or pre-push hook. It can also run as a standalone executable, making the same checks available outside the normal Git hook path. The emphasis is on catching mistakes early, before credentials reach a shared repository where remediation becomes more difficult.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Scan changed content for encoded values, suspicious file contents and strings with unusually high entropy.
• Detect filenames and extensions commonly associated with keys, credentials and other sensitive material.
• Flag files that exceed configured size thresholds, which can help catch accidental commits of unsuitable data.
• Check for strings that resemble credit card numbers as part of the standard validation set.
• Run as a pre-commit hook, pre-push hook, standalone CLI utility or through hook frameworks such as pre-commit.
• Set a severity threshold to control which findings are allowed to block a commit or push.
• Maintain project-specific exceptions in a .talismanrc configuration file.
• Ignore selected detectors for a particular file rather than suppressing all checks against that file.
• Use checksums so an ignored file is scanned again after its contents change.
• Define repository-level and file-level allowed patterns using regular expressions.
• Add custom search patterns for secrets or sensitive strings specific to an organisation.
• Scan Git history from the command line when older repository content also needs examination.
• Calculate checksums from the CLI to help build ignore rules.
• Offer an interactive mode that can assist with managing exceptions.
• Generate HTML reports for reviewing findings outside the normal command-line output.

Website: github.com/thoughtworks/talisman
Support:
Developer: Thoughtworks
License: MIT License

Talisman is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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