Keep your Secrets off your code: GitGuardian

Introduction :-

Everyone tends to make mistakes, and that’s just part of the learning experience. But what if that mistake is something with grave consequences, like leaking essential credentials in your code which could compromise your entire organization to hackers. Nowadays, security and privacy get invaded by such leaks instantly due to bots. These risks could be avoided by using GitGuardian.

GitGuardian is a global cybersecurity startup focusing on code security solutions for DevOps generation. They are a leader in the market of secrets detection and remediation. Their solutions are used by thousands of developers in all industries. GitGuardian helps developers, cloud operation, security, and compliance professionals secure software development and define and enforce policies consistently and globally across all their systems.

Advantages of GitGuardian :-

• GitGuardian solutions monitor public and private repositories in real-time, detect secrets, and alert to allow investigation and quick remediation.
• Secure your software development lifecycle with enterprise-grade secrets detection.
• Eliminate blind spots with an automated, battle-tested detection engine.
• Build custom detectors to enhance your scans for secrets unique to your organization.
• Discover vulnerabilities early and collaboratively, then harness rapid remediation to save time, money, and paperwork.
• Eliminate secrets exposed on internal repositories, GitGuardian Internal Repository Monitoring focuses exclusively on your organization’s repositories.
• With pre-commit git hooks, developers can scan changes before pushing their code and keep secrets out of the VCS.
• Decentralize and automate incident response by alerting the developers involved, and Collecting feedback from the field to understand how the incident interacts with other services and software components.

How to activate GitGuardian :-

1. Go to GitGuardian site
2. Click “Start for Free” button
3. Sign up with your GitHub Account
4. Authorize GitGuardian to access all your repositories
5. In the GitGuardian Dashboard, check if all your repositories are present and click the “Launch Scan” button

Congratulations, your repositories are now under the real-time protection of GitGuardian.

Git hooks integrations using GitGuardian :-

It is essential to have secrets detection within your git server or remote git host because this is where the active threats live. But, secrets that end up within these git repositories must be considered compromised, and revoking them can take time and resources. It is always best to capture secrets before your repository is compromised. This can be achieved with a pre-commit git hook. For more information check this tutorial.

Similarly, we can also integrate with pre-push hook and pre-receive hook

**NOTE: Remember that these implementations require GitGuardian API calls, which allows for only 1000 calls per month in the free plan. Upgrade to Business plan to use up to 10k calls per month

Set up Alerts using GitGuardian :-

Other than email alerts, we can integrate GitGuardian and set up notifications for incidents with various other popular communication services like Discord, Slack, Jira, etc. We can do this by:

1. Go to GitGuardian Dashboard
2. Choose “Integrations” option in the sidebar
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page
4. Under “Alerting” tab, press the install button on which app you would like to use
5. Follow the instructions given on the page and submit

Conclusion :-

GitGuardian is a startup that is respected by the tech community due to its favourability for individual developers and small-scale organizations, and its open-source code. Aside from that. They are the best in their respective field and will keep getting better due to the frequent updates and improvements. If you are not comfortable with GitGuardian or if you feel that it’s not the right one, there are plenty of alternatives that are listed on the GitGuardian site.

! Code safe !