screenscrub

Find credentials in screenshots, extract them to a secret manager, and irreversibly redact them from the images — so secrets don't rot in your notes, screenshots, and ~/Desktop.

Local. Offline. Silent. No network, no telemetry by default.

screenscrub bridges two existing tool categories: GUI redactors (Xnapper, Shhshot, macshot) blur PII by hand but can't tell a secret from an address or capture what they hide; secret scanners (gitleaks, TruffleHog) find real credentials but only in text, never in a PNG. screenscrub brings gitleaks-grade detection — plus a red-team pack and entropy analysis — to pixels, headlessly: it captures each secret to your manager, irreversibly redacts the image, and re-OCRs the result to prove the secret is gone.

A safety net, not a guarantee — screenscrub never claims an image is "guaranteed clean"; OCR and detection both miss things, so always eyeball the results. Read this before you rely on it.

screenscrub scan   ~/Screenshots                 # dry run: detect + report, no writes
screenscrub clean  ~/Screenshots --out ~/clean \ # extract, redact, verify, quarantine
    --sink file://./secrets.age --yes
screenscrub verify ~/clean                       # prove a folder is clean (exit≠0 if not)

screenscrub clean --keep-originals ./tmp
Cleaning 7 image(s) in ./tmp (7 worker(s))…
[1/7] tmp/ssh.jpg — 6 region(s) → tmp/ssh.redacted.jpg ✓ verified
[2/7] tmp/key.jpg — 13 region(s) → tmp/key.redacted.jpg ✓ verified
[3/7] tmp/test2.jpg — 12 region(s) → tmp/test2.redacted.jpg ✓ verified
[4/7] tmp/test5.jpg — 13 region(s) → tmp/test5.redacted.jpg ✓ verified
[5/7] tmp/test3.jpg — error: verification failed: 4 secret region(s) still detectable in tmp/test3.redacted.jpg; original preserved
[6/7] tmp/test4.jpg — error: verification failed: 9 secret region(s) still detectable in tmp/test4.redacted.jpg; original preserved
[7/7] tmp/test6.jpg — error: verification failed: 7 secret region(s) still detectable in tmp/test6.redacted.jpg; original preserved

7/7 file(s) flagged, 382 region(s) total, 3 file(s) errored/unverified.
By kind:
   high-entropy             343
   keyword-secret           15
   db-connection-uri        10
   github-pat               6
   unix-crypt-hash          6
   aws-access-key           1
   stripe-key               1
Needs manual attention (3):
   tmp/test3.jpg — error: verification failed: 4 secret region(s) still detectable in tmp/test3.redacted.jpg; original preserved
   tmp/test4.jpg — error: verification failed: 9 secret region(s) still detectable in tmp/test4.redacted.jpg; original preserved
   tmp/test6.jpg — error: verification failed: 7 secret region(s) still detectable in tmp/test6.redacted.jpg; original preserved

Before — secret values visible	After clean — irreversibly redacted

_{The same screenshot before and after clean: every secret value is decoded to pixels, boxed, and re-encoded to a new image (irreversible) — labels and structure stay readable.}

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Install

Requires the tesseract OCR binary on PATH:

• macOS: brew install tesseract
• Windows: winget install UB-Mannheim.TesseractOCR (or the UB Mannheim installer)
• Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get install tesseract-ocr

Then build:

go build -o screenscrub ./cmd/screenscrub

Cross-compiles to macOS (arm64/amd64) and Windows (amd64) — it shells out to tesseract rather than using cgo. Only tested on macOS.

Usage

scan <dir|file> — dry run

Detects and reports; writes nothing.

screenscrub scan ~/Screenshots --ignore 'node_modules/**' --ignore '*.thumb.png'
screenscrub scan shot.png --json            # machine-readable report
screenscrub scan ~/Screenshots --preview ~/review   # eyeball what clean would redact

--preview <dir> writes a non-destructive copy of each flagged image with every detected region outlined (not filled), so you can confirm what clean would redact before committing. ⚠️ These copies still contain the secrets — the dir is created 0700 and must not be shared.

The report ends with a rollup: a per-kind breakdown and an explicit "Needs manual attention" list — files that errored, failed verification, or produced no OCR text on what should be a screenshot (a silent OCR miss reads identically to a clean image, so it's surfaced rather than trusted).

scan --fail-on-findings exits non-zero when anything is detected — a pre-commit/CI gate.

clean <dir|file> — extract, redact, quarantine

SCREENSCRUB_PASSPHRASE=… screenscrub clean ~/Screenshots \
    --out ~/Screenshots/clean \
    --sink file://./secrets.age \
    --yes

For each image with findings, clean:

1. stores every secret in the sink,
2. writes <name>.redacted.png to --out (or beside the source),
3. moves the original into <out>/quarantine/ encrypted with age.

Secrets go to whichever sink you pass to --sink: age file (default), 1Password (op://), KeePassXC (keepassxc://), macOS Keychain (keychain://), or HashiCorp Vault (vault://) — or hardware-backed age recipients (YubiKey, Touch ID). See Secret sinks.

Flags:

Flag	Meaning
--out <dir>	where redacted copies go (default: beside the source)
--sink <uri>	file://./secrets.age · op://Vault · keepassxc://./v.kdbx · keychain://service · vault://KV
--recipient <age1…>	encrypt to an age recipient (repeatable): X25519, YubiKey, or Touch ID
--recipients-file <f>	file of age recipients, one per line
--passphrase	passphrase for the file sink / quarantine (prefer the env var or --config)
--watch	keep running; process new screenshots as they land (fsnotify)
--purge	shred originals instead of quarantining (see caveat below)
--keep-originals	write redacted copies only; leave originals in place (no quarantine, no passphrase, no --yes) — mutually exclusive with --purge
--yes	confirm destructive original handling (required)
--config <file>	JSON config; lets you keep the passphrase out of argv
--no-verify	skip the re-OCR verification of redacted output (not recommended)
-i, --interactive	open each flagged image and confirm redact/skip before touching it
--llm	use Claude to drop benign over-flags; sends candidate strings to the Anthropic API
--llm-api-key	Anthropic API key for --llm (or ANTHROPIC_API_KEY)
--jobs N	process N images in parallel (default: CPU count)
--manifest <file>	write a JSON map of original→redacted→regions
--ocr-raw / --ocr-upscale N	disable dark-terminal preprocessing / upscale before OCR
--exclude-kind <kind>	suppress findings of a kind (repeatable), e.g. high-entropy — offline precision knob
--min-confidence <0..1>	drop findings below this confidence — offline precision knob
--json	emit the report as JSON
--ignore <glob>	ignore glob, repeatable; ** matches any depth
--lang	tesseract language (default eng)