leakkill

Leaked a key? Find it, see if it's live, and kill it in one command. Free, local, zero dependencies.

Free tools are great at finding secrets. What happens after a leak is usually left to paid platforms: is this key still working, whose account is it, how do I revoke it right now, and how do I clean it out of git history? leakkill does that part too, from your terminal, for free.

$ leakkill verify
#1   LIVE         GitHub token           ghp_************     config.py:3
      octocat  scopes: repo, workflow
#2   DEAD         AWS access key         AKIA************     deploy/old.sh:12
      key id is unknown or deactivated
#3   UNVERIFIABLE Credentials in URL     postgres://app:****@db.prod.internal  .env.backup:1

3 unique secret(s), 1 LIVE.

$ leakkill revoke --only 1 --yes
  #1 GitHub token: REVOKED (HTTP 202)

Install

pip install leakkill

Python 3.9+, no dependencies. Latest development version: pip install git+https://github.com/ayushanand27/leakkill

Commands

Every scan command also accepts --staged (pre-commit), --history (every commit on every branch, including secrets you already "deleted"), --exclude-tests and --json.

What it can verify and revoke

How it compares

Detector and pricing figures come from public sources in October 2026. Use what fits your needs: if breadth of detection matters most, run Gitleaks or TruffleHog alongside leakkill.

Tested with real credentials

End to end on Windows with a real GitHub token and a real Discord webhook: verify reported both LIVE with the right account and channel, revoke --yes returned GitHub 202 and Discord 204, and re-running verify reported both DEAD. Against the real AWS, GitLab, Anthropic and npm APIs, invalid keys are correctly reported DEAD. Providers not yet tested with a live key (Slack, Stripe, OpenAI, Telegram) are covered by tests using simulated API responses.

Benchmark (reproducible, run October 2026)

Noise on clean, popular repos (unique secrets reported, default settings):

Recall on 17 planted realistic secrets: leakkill 17/17, Gitleaks 14/17. Gitleaks missed a Postgres URL with a password, a Discord webhook and a Telegram bot token. The planted set was written by us, so it is biased toward formats we support. Gitleaks detects many formats we don't.

Safety model

• scan never touches the network.
• A secret is only ever sent to the provider that issued it. Hosts are hard-coded, and HTTP redirects are never followed, so a credential can't be bounced to another server (this is tested).
• Verification uses read-only identity calls: GitHub GET /user, Slack auth.test, AWS GetCallerIdentity and so on.
• revoke is a dry run unless you pass --yes, and only touches keys that verified as live.
• Raw secrets are never printed or written to the report. The only exception is the opt-in report --replacements FILE (needed by git filter-repo), which is created with permissions 600.

Cleaning git history

leakkill revoke --history --yes                 # 1. kill live keys first: history rewrites don't help once copied
pip install git-filter-repo
leakkill report --history --replacements .leakkill-replacements.txt
git filter-repo --replace-text .leakkill-replacements.txt
rm .leakkill-replacements.txt
git push --force --all && git push --force --tags  # every collaborator must re-clone

AI coding agent guard (Claude Code)

leakkill install-claude-hook adds hooks to .claude/settings.json that block:

• prompts that contain secrets (before they reach the model)
• reading .env, *.pem, id_rsa, .npmrc and similar, whether through the Read tool or any shell command that names such a file (cat, grep, base64, python -c, cp …). .env.example is allowed.
• writing hard-coded keys into code (writing them into .env is allowed)

This was tested live with the Claude Code CLI: prompts with keys, Read .env, cat .env, grep . .env and writing an AWS key into app.py were all blocked. The check is pattern-based: a command that builds the file name at runtime can get past it. Pair it with OS-level permissions for hard guarantees.

Use in CI (GitHub Actions)

- run: pip install leakkill
- run: leakkill scan --exclude-tests .

Use with the pre-commit framework

# .pre-commit-config.yaml
repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/ayushanand27/leakkill
    rev: v0.3.0
    hooks:
      - id: leakkill

Or without the framework: leakkill install-hook.

Suppressing false positives

• Add leakkill:ignore on a line.
• List paths or globs in .leakkillignore (for example fixtures/ or *.snap).
• High-entropy matches ignore placeholders (your_key, example, ${VAR}), variables named test/example/fake/mock, password hashes and values without digits.

Known limitations

• Fewer detectors than Gitleaks or TruffleHog.
• Verification behind a proxy that injects its own credentials (some corporate and sandbox proxies do) can report the proxy's identity. Run verify from a normal network.
• AWS keys can only be verified when the secret key is found too (any file in the scan).
• Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, npm and Telegram offer no revoke API, so those need a manual click.

MIT licensed.