Nosey Parker is a command-line tool that finds secrets and sensitive information in textual data. It is useful both for offensive and defensive security testing.

Key features:

• It supports scanning files, directories, and the entire history of Git repositories
• It uses regular expression matching with a set of 95 patterns chosen for high signal-to-noise based on experience and feedback from offensive security engagements
• It groups matches together that share the same secret, further emphasizing signal over noise
• It is fast: it can scan at hundreds of megabytes per second on a single core, and is able to scan 100GB of Linux kernel source history in less than 2 minutes on an older MacBook Pro

This open-source version of Nosey Parker is a reimplementation of the internal version that is regularly used in offensive security engagements at Praetorian. The internal version has additional capabilities for false positive suppression and an alternative machine learning-based detection engine. Read more in blog posts here and here.

Building from source

1. (On x86_64) Install the Hyperscan library and headers for your system

On macOS using Homebrew:

brew install hyperscan pkg-config

On Ubuntu 22.04:

apt install libhyperscan-dev pkg-config

1. (On non-x86_64) Build Vectorscan from source

You will need several dependencies, including cmake, boost, ragel, and pkg-config.

Download and extract the source for the 5.4.8 release of Vectorscan:

wget https://github.com/VectorCamp/vectorscan/archive/refs/tags/vectorscan/5.4.8.tar.gz && tar xfz 5.4.8.tar.gz

Build with cmake:

cd vectorscan-vectorscan-5.4.8 && cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release . && cmake --build build

Set the HYPERSCAN_ROOT environment variable so that Nosey Parker builds against your from-source build of Vectorscan:

export HYPERSCAN_ROOT="$PWD/build"

Note: The Nosey Parker Dockerfile builds Vectorscan from source and links against that.

2. Install the Rust toolchain

Recommended approach: install from https://rustup.rs

3. Build using Cargo

cargo build --release

This will produce a binary at target/release/noseyparker.

Docker Usage

A prebuilt Docker image is available for the latest release for x86_64:

docker pull ghcr.io/praetorian-inc/noseyparker:latest

A prebuilt Docker image is available for the most recent commit for x86_64:

docker pull ghcr.io/praetorian-inc/noseyparker:edge

For other architectures (e.g., ARM) you will need to build the Docker image yourself:

docker build -t noseyparker .

Run the Docker image with a mounted volume:

docker run -v "$PWD":/opt/ noseyparker

Note: The Docker image runs noticeably slower than a native binary, particularly on macOS.

Usage quick start

The datastore

Most Nosey Parker commands use a datastore. This is a special directory that Nosey Parker uses to record its findings and maintain its internal state. A datastore will be implicitly created by the scan command if needed. You can also create a datastore explicitly using the datastore init -d PATH command.

Scanning filesystem content for secrets

Nosey Parker has built-in support for scanning files, recursively scanning directories, and scanning the entire history of Git repositories.

For example, if you have a Git clone of CPython locally at cpython.git, you can scan its entire history with the scan command. Nosey Parker will create a new datastore at np.cpython and saves its findings there.

$ noseyparker scan --datastore np.cpython cpython.git
Found 28.30 GiB from 18 plain files and 427,712 blobs from 1 Git repos [00:00:04]
Scanning content  ████████████████████ 100%  28.30 GiB/28.30 GiB  [00:00:53]
Scanned 28.30 GiB from 427,730 blobs in 54 seconds (538.46 MiB/s); 4,904/4,904 new matches

 Rule                      Distinct Groups   Total Matches
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 PEM-Encoded Private Key             1,076           1,1   92
 Generic Secret                        331             478
 netrc Credentials                      42           3,201
 Generic API Key                         2              31
 md5crypt Hash                           1               2

Run the `report` command next to show finding details.

Scanning Git repos by URL, GitHub username, or GitHub organization name

Nosey Parker can also scan Git repos that have not already been cloned to the local filesystem. The --git-url URL, --github-user NAME, and --github-org NAME options to scan allow you to specify repositories of interest.

For example, to scan the Nosey Parker repo itself:

$ noseyparker scan --datastore np.noseyparker --git-url https://github.com/praetorian-inc/noseyparker

For example, to scan accessible repositories belonging to octocat:

$ noseyparker scan --datastore np.noseyparker --github-user octocat

These input specifiers will use an optional GitHub token if available in the NP_GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable. Providing an access token gives a higher API rate limit and may make additional repositories accessible to you.

See noseyparker help scan for more details.

Summarizing findings

Nosey Parker prints out a summary of its findings when it finishes scanning. You can also run this step separately:

$ noseyparker summarize --datastore np.cpython

 Rule                      Distinct Groups   Total Matches
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 PEM-Encoded Private Key             1,076           1,192
 Generic Secret                        331             478
 netrc Credentials                      42           3,201
 Generic API Key                         2              31
 md5crypt Hash                           1               2

Additional output formats are supported, including JSON and JSON lines, via the --format=FORMAT option.

Reporting detailed findings

To see details of Nosey Parker's findings, use the report command. This prints out a text-based report designed for human consumption:

$ noseyparker github repos list --user octocat
https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World.git
https://github.com/octocat/Spoon-Knife.git
https://github.com/octocat/boysenberry-repo-1.git
https://github.com/octocat/git-consortium.git
https://github.com/octocat/hello-worId.git
https://github.com/octocat/linguist.git
https://github.com/octocat/octocat.github.io.git
https://github.com/octocat/test-repo1.git