Spillkit
Leaked a secret?

Project

Changelog

All notable changes are listed here. The format follows Keep a Changelog, and versions follow Semantic Versioning.

Unreleased

3.8.1 - 2026-10-28

Changed

  • leak plan ranks 1Password service account tokens and account Secret Keys, and age encryption keys, with the most dangerous secrets: they open everything they protect. PKCS#12 files rank with private keys. All four were filed under “Other secret” before. The rotation guide has a row for password manager credentials and for age and SOPS keys.
  • Site: every name in the “Works with” row has an icon. AWS, Azure and Azure DevOps get neutral glyphs rather than their logos, which their owners do not allow on third-party sites; gitleaks has no logo.

3.8.0 - 2026-10-28

Added

  • leak rotate azure-devops-pat rotates an Azure DevOps personal access token in the order that avoids downtime.
    • check lists your active tokens; with --authorization-id, it shows the leaked one. It points at the audit events that show whether Azure DevOps has already revoked it.
    • replace creates a new token with the same scope, for one organisation only, and pipes it straight into your secret store. If the store refuses it, the new token is revoked again.
    • Once the new token is deployed, revoke removes the leaked one.
    • It signs in as the user from az login, and the token travels in a header on stdin, never in a command line. The leak plan catalog points Azure DevOps token findings at the recipe.

Fixed

Found by a second independent review, of the code added in 3.6 and 3.7:

  • leak respond did not rebuild the incident report when an earlier step ran again. For example, after scanning a clone of a repository that was already gone, the report still said there were no secrets. A step now also reruns when a step whose results it uses has run again: a new scan means a new plan and report, a new hunt a new report.
  • leak respond stopped with a usage error, and no record, when the hunt could not start. It now reads the hunt’s folder from the hunt’s own output, and a hunt that cannot start is recorded as failed.
  • leak respond --status wrote to the incident’s state file. It now changes nothing. Settings are recorded only when they change.
  • leak respond with an unusable folder name as the incident ID created the folder before refusing it, which blocked the retry. The ID is now checked first.
  • For a repository that is already deleted, leak hunt reported its fork list as “not checked”, so the hunt, and the incident, could never be complete. That check is covered by the same-name forks search, and is now reported as “covered below”.
  • install.sh installed the version folder as readable by its owner only, so on a shared prefix (sudo ... --prefix /usr/local) nobody else could run leak. It is now readable by everyone.

Found by an accessibility audit (axe-core, WCAG 2.1 AA) of every page of the site and every generated report:

  • Code blocks and tables that scroll sideways could not be reached with the keyboard on first load, because the check ran before the web fonts had loaded. It now runs again once they have.
  • The how-to box of the incident report and the rotation plan was outside every landmark, so screen reader users moving by landmark missed it. It is now a labelled aside.

3.7.1 - 2026-10-28

Added

  • The README shows the last screen of leak respond, rendered from a real run.

Changed

  • leak respond names what the hunt found (for example “Repository on GitHub”), and keeps its lines short enough for a normal terminal.

Fixed

  • leak respond recorded a hunt that found something as complete even when some sources could not be checked. leak hunt exits 1 in that case, so respond now counts the unchecked sources itself and marks the hunt incomplete, with what to do.
  • leak hunt listed the leaked repository among the owner’s “other” public repositories, and marked an owner with none as “review: 0”. It now lists only the others, and none is clean.
  • A clean leak scan in 3.7.0 said “No secrets found in every commit”; it says “in any commit” again.
  • Terminal images: status marks (✔ ✘) no longer push the rest of their line out of column.

3.7.0 - 2026-10-28

Added

  • leak respond <owner>/<repo> runs the first hour of an incident in order, in one incident folder: evidence snapshot, full-history scan, rotation plan, copy hunt and incident report.
    • Every step is written to timeline.md with its UTC time, and its full output to logs/.
    • Rotating, the takedown and telling people stay with you. It says what to do for each one, and --done rotate (or takedown, notify) records the time you finished.
    • Run it again with --dir to continue where it stopped. --redo hunt repeats the hunt a week later, as the runbook asks, and --status shows where the incident stands.
    • It only reads, like the steps it runs. The folder gets a .gitignore because the evidence holds the leaked code.
  • Fast pull request scans.
    • leak scan --commits BASE..HEAD scans only the commits in a range.
    • The GitHub Action’s new scope: changes input scans only the commits a pull request or push adds, in seconds on a large repository.
    • If that range is not in the checkout (a branch’s first push, or a shallow clone), the Action scans the full history and says so, so nothing is skipped silently.
    • scope: history stays the default.

3.6.1 - 2026-10-28

Added

  • Homebrew: brew install aboutbilal/tap/spillkit on macOS and Linux, from the new aboutBilal/homebrew-tap. It brings gitleaks and jq, plus a current bash on macOS. A daily workflow moves the formula to each new release only after it has checked the archive’s checksum and Sigstore signature, and has installed and tested the formula.

Changed

  • leak doctor and install.sh point macOS users with an old bash at the Homebrew formula, which brings a current bash with it.
  • SECURITY.md says how the Homebrew formula is verified before it moves to a new release.

Fixed

  • leak audit did not count Spillkit’s own leak-guard pre-commit hook, or the Spillkit GitHub Action, as secret scanning. A repository protected by Spillkit itself lost 25 points.
  • On phones, the copy button on the home page’s install commands covered the first line of code.

3.6.0 - 2026-10-28

Added

  • leak rotate gitlab-token handles GitLab personal, project and group access tokens, on gitlab.com or a self-managed instance (GITLAB_URL).
    • check shows the token’s scopes, last use (with IP addresses) and expiry. Without --token-id it lists the active tokens, so you can find the leaked one.
    • rotate has GitLab revoke the leaked token and issue its replacement in one call, piped straight into your secret store. Because a revoked token cannot be brought back, the store is checked first. The new token gets 90 days instead of GitLab’s one-week default (--expires to change it). If the store still refuses the new token, it is revoked too.
    • revoke is for when you made and deployed a replacement yourself.
    • GITLAB_TOKEN is sent in a header on stdin, never in a command line. The leak plan catalog points gitlab-pat findings at the recipe.
  • The GitHub Action’s scan mode ends with what to rotate first. When secrets are found, the job summary lists them most dangerous first, with where each is revoked, the leak rotate recipe and the guide section. Files and commits are left out of the summary, because the job summaries of public repositories are public. The full plan is at the new plan output.
  • leak plan also writes rotation-plan.json, the same items for automation.
  • CI runs the Action on a leak built by leak demo, so the plan in the summary is tested on every change.

Changed

  • A new AWS access key is stored in Secrets Manager without a trailing newline.

Fixed

  • The GitHub Action stopped as soon as a scan, audit, audit-org or hunt had findings. GitHub runs Action scripts with bash -e, so the first non-zero exit ended the step. That left no job summary, no outputs and no Slack, Teams or Discord alert, and it ignored fail-on-findings: false. Every exit code is now handled by the script itself. The new CI step that runs the Action on a leak found this.

Found by an independent review of the 3.5 code:

  • install.sh with a relative --prefix made a leak link that led nowhere, yet reported success. The prefix is now made absolute, and the link is checked.
  • Reinstalling a version deleted the working copy before unpacking the new one, so a failed unpack left nothing. The new version is now unpacked beside the old one and swapped in only when complete.
  • leak demo stopped at its first step for anyone using Spillkit’s ignore file or pre-commit hook globally, because they rightly blocked the planted secrets. It now commits past both, in its own throwaway repository only.
  • leak demo could also stop at random on Alpine, because a pipe closed early under pipefail. A demo that stops now removes its folder, so it can simply be run again.
  • leak plan listed Amazon Bedrock API keys as AWS access keys and pointed them at leak rotate aws-key. They now have their own entry (billing attached, no recipe), with where to revoke them.
  • leak audit-org --gitlab also graded projects shared into the group by other groups. It now lists only the group’s own projects.
  • leak rotate:
    • --store without a target (--store aws-sm) wrote to a secret named after the store type. It is now refused, as are targets that start with -.
    • The check step used the wrong project for App Engine and Compute Engine default service accounts.
    • Tracing (bash -x) is switched off, because it would print the new secret.

Removed

  • The old container package ghcr.io/aboutbilal/leak-response-toolkit (images 2.1.0 to 3.2.0, from before the rename). Use ghcr.io/aboutbilal/spillkit, which has every release since 3.3.0.

3.5.2 - 2026-10-28

Changed

  • The GitHub Action’s description is shorter (115 characters), so it fits a GitHub Marketplace listing.

3.5.1 - 2026-10-28

Added

  • SLSA build provenance on every release for the source archive and the install script, attached as spillkit-vX.Y.Z.intoto.jsonl and verifiable with gh attestation verify spillkit-vX.Y.Z.tar.gz --repo aboutBilal/spillkit.

Fixed

  • install.sh refused to install when cosign 2 was installed, because releases use the newer Sigstore bundle format. It now passes --new-bundle-format to cosign 2.4 and later, and says when cosign is too old.
  • leak audit in CI (and the GitHub Action in audit mode) no longer reports “no pre-commit hook installed in this clone”: a CI checkout never has one, so the finding was noise in code scanning. Developer clones are still checked.

3.5.0 - 2026-10-28

From finding secrets to getting them rotated, and from hearing about Spillkit to seeing it work.

Added

  • leak plan turns a scan report into a rotation checklist, most dangerous first: anything that can create resources or read data, then anything with billing attached, then anything that grants further access, then the rest, oldest first within each. Every item says where the secret is revoked, links to its section of the rotation guide and names the leak rotate recipe where one exists. An unidentified secret right next to a known one (an AWS secret key under its key ID) is kept as its own item but rotated with its pair. Output: rotation-plan.md with checkboxes for the incident issue and a print-ready rotation-plan.html with a TLP label. The order comes from scripts/secret-types.txt, a catalog of gitleaks rules that a test keeps in step with the guide.
  • leak rotate rotates an AWS access key, an Entra ID app registration secret, a Google Cloud service account key or an Azure storage account key, one step at a time: check, replace, disable, delete (renew for storage keys). Without --apply it is a dry run that prints every step with its exact command. The new secret goes from the provider’s CLI straight into AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault or Google Secret Manager (--store) through a pipe: never shown, never written to disk, never in a command line; if the store refuses it, the new credential is deleted again. Disabling and deleting ask for the key ID first. Every applied step is logged with its UTC time in rotation-log.tsv.
  • leak demo builds a repository with a leak made for the purpose (random keys that work nowhere) and runs audit, scan, plan and a rotation dry run on it, in about a minute.
  • One-line install: curl -fsSL https://github.com/aboutBilal/spillkit/releases/latest/download/install.sh | bash. It checks the release’s SHA-256 and, when cosign is installed, its Sigstore signature (--require-signature makes that mandatory), installs under ~/.local without root, and runs on the bash 3.2 that macOS ships. Releases now carry install.sh and its signature.
  • GitLab groups in leak audit-org: --gitlab <group>, including subgroups, with GITLAB_TOKEN (read_api) for private projects and GITLAB_URL for self-managed GitLab. Forks and archived projects are skipped.

Changed

  • leak scan and leak audit now point to leak plan as the next step; leak doctor also reports the cloud CLIs leak rotate uses and cosign.
  • The runbook, cheat sheet, rotation guide, README and home page show the new commands. 51 tests, up from 41.

3.4.0 - 2026-10-27

Added

  • leak audit --sarif FILE writes the audit findings as SARIF 2.1.0 for GitHub code scanning. Each finding points at the file it concerns (the tracked secret file, the code that reads environment variables, the exact Dockerfile line, the first commit with a secret) and carries a severity, so critical findings rank as High. The GitHub Action passes sarif-file through in audit mode too.
  • Bitbucket Cloud and Azure DevOps in leak audit-org: --bitbucket <workspace> (with BITBUCKET_TOKEN, an access token) and --azure-devops <org>[/<project>] (with AZURE_DEVOPS_PAT). Forks and disabled repositories are skipped, and a listing error exits 4 instead of reporting an empty organisation as clean. As everywhere else, tokens reach curl and git on standard input or through the environment, never as command-line arguments.

3.3.0 - 2026-10-27

Changed

  • Reports rebuilt as standard incident documents. leak report now follows the structure of NIST SP 800-61r3: document control (incident ID, severity, version, author, approver, distribution), a bottom-line summary with the decisions needed, incident details, a UTC timeline filled in from the tool runs, the investigation, secrets to rotate, impact, a notification assessment (for example GDPR Articles 33 and 34), actions with owners and due dates, root cause, and appendices for evidence checksums, method and limitations, a severity scale and document history. Every page carries a FIRST TLP 2.0 handling label, the incident ID and “Page X of Y” when printed. New options: --id, --tlp and --blank. The default file name is now incident-report.html, and the hand-fill template is templates/incident-report.html.

  • The organisation dashboard (leak audit-org) uses the same document style: colours follow the data, every finding is labelled Critical or Fix with its remedy, and a method section states the weights and grade thresholds. New option: --tlp.

  • Renamed to Spillkit. The project is now Spillkit: the emergency kit you keep ready for leaked secrets. The command is still leak. The repository moves to aboutBilal/spillkit (GitHub redirects the old address), the container image to ghcr.io/aboutbilal/spillkit (images for 3.2.0 and earlier were published as ghcr.io/aboutbilal/leak-response-toolkit, removed on 2026-10-28; use 3.3.0 or later), and the documentation to aboutbilal.github.io/spillkit. Update uses: lines and pre-commit repo: entries to the new name.
  • New logo: an emergency case with a key, in place of the shield.

Added

  • Redesigned documentation site and home page. The home page is built around one idea: a leaked key can be in use within five minutes. A clock starts when the page opens and a stopwatch fills toward five minutes in real time, next to the product’s own output, four verified numbers, illustrated stages, a map of where copies survive, product screenshots, the first-15-minutes plan, release verification and installation. The documentation has light and dark themes with a switch, IBM Plex Sans, dark code blocks with copy buttons, callouts with icons, heading links, an “On this page” rail, a mobile drawer, print styles for runbooks, and a 404 page.
  • Documentation search. Press Ctrl K, ⌘K or / on any page to search every runbook, guide and template by section.
  • Site checks in CI. tools/check-site.py checks every internal link and anchor, page titles, descriptions, headings, image alt text and the search index on every pull request, before anything is deployed.

Fixed

  • Documentation site: links in the README’s HTML header pointed at .md files and returned 404 on the site; the Overview and Incident checklist pages had no main heading.

  • Documentation site: the home page no longer overflows on phones (grid columns shrink; long command lines scroll inside their box).
  • The test suite no longer needs GNU timeout, which macOS does not have; hangs are caught by bats’ own per-test limit (BATS_TEST_TIMEOUT) on every platform.

3.2.0 - 2026-10-27

An independent review found 18 issues before launch. All are fixed, each with a regression test.

Security

  • leak audit could print a secret value for a Dockerfile with an unusual name (for example Dockerfile:v2). The finding is now assembled from the file, line and variable name only, so the value cannot appear.
  • GITHUB_TOKEN and webhook URLs are passed to curl and git on standard input or through the environment, never as command-line arguments, so they no longer appear in process lists.

Fixed

  • Fail closed. A scanner error (for example an invalid .gitleaks.toml) exited with the same code as “secrets found”, and the GitHub Action then passed. Scanner failures now exit 4, and the Action fails.
  • No false “clean”. leak hunt reported rate-limited or failed sources (Sourcegraph, GitHub activity, the event archive) as clean. Every source now reports “not checked” on failure, and hunt exits 4 when the result is incomplete.
  • leak forks and leak commits exit 4 on API errors instead of printing an empty result.
  • leak audit-org includes repositories whose names start with a dot (such as .github), clones private repositories with the token, marks repositories it could not clone as “not audited” (excluded from the average), and stops listing once --limit is reached.
  • A missing option value (for example --limit with nothing after it) exits 2 instead of hanging.
  • leak notify sends every word of the message, not only the last.
  • leak report reports a clean scan as clean.
  • leak scan writes its default report to ./secrets-report.json instead of the parent folder.
  • --help works after other arguments; usage lines name the leak command.
  • Tables print without column installed; the minimum bash version is stated correctly (4.4); leak no longer needs readlink -f.
  • README and SECURITY claims corrected: CodeQL runs on main and pull requests, every contacted service is listed, and snapshot is described as keeping a copy of the leaked repository.

Added

  • scripts/lib.sh: shared helpers enforcing the rules above (credentials out of argv, errors never reported as clean, one set of exit codes).
  • Exit codes are documented everywhere: 0 clean, 1 findings, 2 usage error, 4 incomplete.
  • GitHub Action: github-token input (defaults to the workflow token); hunts warn when sources could not be checked.
  • Releases move the major tag (v3) automatically, so @v3 always means the latest 3.x release.
  • CI runs actionlint.
  • Documentation site (GitHub Pages): a product home page and the docs, with sidebar filtering, an “On this page” contents rail, copy buttons, previous and next links, dark mode and self-hosted fonts. Lighthouse: accessibility 100 on every page.
  • 9 regression tests (34 in total).

3.1.0 - 2026-10-27

Added

  • Visual language (assets/DESIGN.md): one accent colour, status colours only for status, an 8-point grid, two corner radii, one type pair. Every README image, the social card, the terminal renderer and the HTML report and dashboard now use the same tokens.

Changed

  • leak audit wording is shorter and clearer (for example “no secret files tracked by Git”), and the summary line reads Score 100/100 · Grade A. Scripts that parsed Score: should match Score instead.
  • leak scan names the pinned gitleaks version instead of printing the full image reference.

Fixed

  • Tests hung on macOS: BSD tr keeps reading /dev/urandom when SIGPIPE is ignored. Random test values now come from a bounded read. The macOS CI job passes.

3.0.0 - 2026-10-27

Added

  • leak audit-org: grades every repository of a GitHub organisation or user, or every repository in a local folder, and writes an HTML dashboard, a markdown summary and JSON.
  • leak scan --sarif: SARIF 2.1.0 output for GitHub code scanning. Values stay redacted.
  • leak audit --json: machine-readable grade, score and checks.
  • leak notify: alerts to Slack, Microsoft Teams (Workflows webhooks) or Discord. The webhook URL is read from LEAK_WEBHOOK_URL, never from arguments.
  • GitHub Action: audit-org mode, sarif-file, webhook-url and webhook-format inputs, and a report output.
  • .pre-commit-hooks.yaml: forbid-secret-files and leak-guard hooks usable from any repository.
  • leak hunt checks public GitLab projects with the same name.
  • macOS job in CI (Homebrew bash, BSD tools).
  • Animated terminal demo (respects reduced-motion settings), and dashboard and report previews in the README.

Changed

  • Breaking for automation: leak hunt reports use plain words (clean, **found**, review, not checked) instead of symbols. Update any script that matched the old markers.
  • The @v3 Action tag replaces @v2 in examples.
  • Documentation edited for precision: plain headings without emoji, measured claims only.

Fixed

  • macOS compatibility: POSIX character classes instead of \s, no GNU-only sed flags, shasum when sha256sum is absent, BSD date fallback.

2.3.0 - 2026-10-27

A new face: the toolkit now presents itself like the product it is.

Added

  • Brand: a shield-and-keyhole logo, a product hero banner with a live leak audit card, a “How it works” lifecycle graphic, and a matching social preview card.
  • Report preview: a real leak report rendered as a document preview, so readers see what leadership receives.
  • “Built to be trusted” section: signed releases, SBOM and provenance, OpenSSF Scorecard, pinned dependencies, analysis and tests, each verifiable.

Changed

  • README rebuilt as a product page: hero, live badges (CI, Scorecard, latest release, signed releases), install, demos, incident quick-start, prevention, CI, commands, trust, comparison, FAQ.

2.2.0 - 2026-10-27

Supply-chain hardening, guided by the OpenSSF Scorecard results.

Added

  • Signed releases: every release gets a source archive, its SHA-256 and a keyless Sigstore signature bundle; the container image is signed by digest. Verification commands are in SECURITY.md.
  • CodeQL static analysis of the workflows and Python tooling.
  • Dependabot now also updates the container base image.
  • SECURITY.md: supported versions, what counts as a vulnerability, and a coordinated-disclosure timeline.

Changed

  • Every container image reference (Dockerfile, CI, scripts, prevention kit) is pinned by digest as well as by tag.
  • The Scorecard badge links directly to the current score.

2.1.0 - 2026-10-27

Added

  • Container image ghcr.io/aboutbilal/leak-response-toolkit (amd64 and arm64) with every dependency, gitleaks included; runs as a non-root user.
  • Release automation: every version tag publishes GitHub release notes from this changelog (backfilling earlier tags) and the image, with an SBOM and build provenance.
  • OpenSSF Scorecard analysis on every push to main and weekly, with a README badge.
  • make install / make uninstall (puts leak on your PATH) and make image.
  • README: install options, a real leak audit demo, an honest comparison with gitleaks, TruffleHog and GitGuardian, and an FAQ.
  • tools/render-terminal-svg.py: README images are generated from real command output.
  • CITATION.cff, ROADMAP.md, a social preview image.

Fixed

  • leak audit printed the value of a secret found in a Dockerfile ARG/ENV line. It now shows only the file, line and variable name (API_TOKEN=<redacted>), and a test enforces it.
  • leak now resolves symlinks, so it works when installed on the PATH or inside the image.
  • leak audit no longer warns about documentation that mentions environment variables, or about example Dockerfiles.

2.0.0 - 2026-10-27

Prevention becomes the second half of the kit: not only responding to leaks, but designing them out.

Added

  • Secrets by design: an architecture guide with five principles, a reference architecture, an 8-layer control matrix, maturity levels 0–4, a 90-day rollout, metrics and a design-review checklist.
  • Prevention kit, every file tested: secret-aware .gitignore, pre-commit config (gitleaks, private-key detection, blocked secret file types), a plain git hook, a gitleaks config with custom rules, CI templates for GitHub Actions, GitLab, Azure Pipelines and Bitbucket, keyless OIDC login to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, .dockerignore, a BuildKit build-secret example, .env.example.
  • ./leak audit: grades a repository’s secret hygiene A–F with a fix for every gap.
  • ./leak report: builds the leadership report from hunt and scan results (secret types only; content HTML-escaped).
  • ./leak doctor: checks a machine is ready before an incident.
  • GitHub Action (action.yml): scan, audit or hunt in any repository’s CI, with job summaries; self-tested in this repository’s CI.
  • hunt also writes machine-readable results.jsonl and meta.json.
  • Rotation guide: AI provider keys, container and package registries, Kubernetes, Terraform Cloud, source platform tokens, messaging, payments, webhooks.
  • Tests: 16 offline tests (audit grades, report escaping, doctor).

Changed

  • This repository now uses the prevention kit on itself (./leak audit . → Grade A).
  • README reorganised around prevent and respond.

1.1.0 - 2026-10-27

Added

  • ./leak: one command for every script (snapshot, scan, forks, hunt, commits), with tests.
  • CHEATSHEET.md: the first 15 minutes on one page, with a “who to call” table to fill in ahead of time.
  • templates/incident-issue.md: a team checklist to paste into a private issue tracker.
  • README front page: banner, sourced “why minutes matter” figures, command table and a terminal image of real, redacted output.

1.0.0 - 2026-10-27

Added

  • Runbook for code or secrets exposed in a public repository, and a scenario guide: own repository, made public by mistake, copied to another account, provider alerts, leaks outside Git (gists, pastes, CI logs, images, packages, chat), external reports, non-GitHub platforms.
  • Rotation guide per secret type (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, GitHub, databases, SSH and certificates, application secrets) and guidance for keys meant to be public.
  • Investigation guide with log queries for Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and databases.
  • Where copies survive: archives, forks, re-uploads, evidence that disappears, removal requests.
  • Prevention guide, including a measured test of what push protection and gitleaks each catch.
  • Practice drill for teams.
  • Scripts: snapshot-evidence.sh, scan-secrets.sh (redacted, full history), list-forks.sh, hunt-copies.sh (15+ public sources, markdown report), find-commit-copies.sh, all with --help.
  • Templates: incident timeline, takedown request, notification messages, post-incident review, executive report (print-ready HTML).
  • Quality: offline bats tests, shellcheck, gitleaks on full history, link and anchor checks in CI, Dependabot for pinned actions, pre-commit hook, contribution guide, issue and pull request templates, security policy.
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