leakkill

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

Most secret scanners stop at finding secrets. leakkill also answers what comes next: 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? It installs with a plain pip install (no dependencies), runs locally, and can stop AI coding agents from reading or writing secrets in the first place.

$ 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

Or with Docker, no Python needed:

docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/scan" ghcr.io/ayushanand27/leakkill            # scan this folder
docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/scan" ghcr.io/ayushanand27/leakkill --history  # every commit

Commands

Every scan command also accepts --include-ignored (also scan .gitignored files, which are left out by default), --staged (pre-commit), --history (every commit on every branch, including secrets you already "deleted"), --agents (secrets your AI coding agents stored on this machine, see below), --exclude-tests and --json.

What it can verify and revoke

How it compares

Where each is strongest (accuracy below): Betterleaks finds the most real credentials; Kingfisher has the fewest false alarms and the broadest platform coverage with validation and revocation; TruffleHog verifies the most providers. leakkill's niche is a dependency-free pip install that goes from finding to revoked key to cleanup plan, guards AI coding agents, and is the best of these at passwords embedded in URLs and Basic auth headers.

Figures from each project's documentation, October 2026. Use what fits: running two scanners is common.

Detection rules

leakkill's own 32 rules cover the providers it can verify and revoke. On top of those, it includes 214 provider rules from Gitleaks (MIT), translated to Python by tools/import_gitleaks.py from a pinned, checksum-verified release, together with Gitleaks' entropy thresholds and allowlists. Thank you to the Gitleaks maintainers. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Speed

Measured on 4 cores (October 2026), wall-clock time for a full scan:

On typical repositories leakkill is faster; on very large ones Gitleaks (Go) is about 2x faster.

Tested with real credentials

End to end on Windows with real, throwaway credentials:

Against the real AWS, GitLab, Anthropic and npm APIs, invalid keys are correctly reported DEAD. Providers not yet tested with a live key (OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Replicate, DigitalOcean, SendGrid, Telegram, and the other 13 added in 0.7) are covered by tests using simulated API responses.

Accuracy (independent dataset)

On Samsung CredData, 67,896 lines labeled by people, every tool scored by the same script (details and how to reproduce):

Compare on the "without OpenSSL test vectors" column: those are public crypto test data, not leaks. There, leakkill and Betterleaks are level on F1. Betterleaks finds more credentials (recall 0.379 vs 0.300); leakkill raises far fewer false alarms (precision 0.922 vs 0.585). leakkill is far ahead on passwords in URLs and Basic auth headers, because it decodes and checks them. The generic rules were tuned on this dataset, which flatters leakkill somewhat; false alarms on four clean repositories (requests, flask, django, express) stayed at 1 / 2 / 3 / 0.

How it's tested

• 163 tests on Linux, macOS and Windows with Python 3.9 and 3.13; CI fails below 88% branch coverage (currently 93%).
• Property-based fuzz tests: the scanner never crashes on random input, never prints a raw secret, finds a planted token in any surrounding text, and gives the same answer scanning a whole file or line by line. (Fuzzing found two real bugs before release: a guard crash and a slow-input case, both fixed.)
• Coverage-guided fuzzing with Atheris via ClusterFuzzLite on every pull request and weekly, of the scanner, the transcript reader and the AI agent guard. Its first run found a real bug in under a minute: the guard could quote a secret hidden in a file name back to the agent. Fixed, with a regression test.
• Every one of the 246 rules is checked in CI against hostile input built from its own keywords, because Python's regex engine, unlike Go's, can be made to backtrack for minutes. The sweep found and fixed 4 such rules among those imported from Gitleaks.
• Live tests against real APIs with real throwaway keys (above), and of the Claude Code guard in the real CLI.
• OpenSSF Best Practices (passing), SonarCloud, OpenSSF Scorecard, pinned and hash-locked CI tooling, signed PyPI provenance, Sigstore-signed GitHub releases (see SECURITY.md).

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 and never overwrites an existing file.

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

leakkill install-agent-hooks                 # all four, in this project
leakkill install-agent-hooks cursor codex    # just these
leakkill install-agent-hooks --global        # for your user account, every project

Sensitive files are .env (but not .env.example), *.pem, *.key, id_rsa, .npmrc, .pypirc and similar; a shell command that names one (cat, grep, base64, python -c, cp …) is blocked too. Writing keys into .env is allowed, since that is where they belong. If the guard itself fails, it blocks rather than lets a secret through. Codex only runs hooks you trust: after installing, type /hooks in Codex and trust the leakkill hook.

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. Cursor, Copilot and Codex are tested against the hook formats in their documentation, through the same command they run; if you see one misbehave, please open an issue. 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.

Secrets your AI agents already stored

leakkill scan --agents      # what's there
leakkill verify --agents    # ...and which of those keys still work

AI coding agents keep plain-text session transcripts and prompt histories, and MCP server configs often hold API keys. A key you pasted into a chat, or a .env the agent read, stays on disk there, and was sent to the model provider. --agents scans, on your machine only:

• Claude Code (~/.claude.json, ~/.claude/ including session transcripts), Codex (~/.codex/), GitHub Copilot CLI (~/.copilot/), Gemini CLI (~/.gemini/), Cursor and VS Code (Copilot Chat) chat histories, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Desktop and VS Code MCP configs
• this project's .mcp.json, .cursor/mcp.json, .vscode/mcp.json, .claude/settings*.json, .gemini/settings.json

Transcripts are decoded, so a key behind JSON escapes is still found and reported at its line. The agents' own login files (~/.codex/auth.json, ~/.claude/.credentials.json, Gemini's OAuth file) are skipped, since that is where their tokens belong. Cursor and VS Code keep chats in SQLite databases (state.vscdb); they are opened read-only, so a running editor is never disturbed.

Use in CI (GitHub Action)

- uses: actions/checkout@v7
- uses: ayushanand27/leakkill@v0

The build fails if a secret is found, and the incident report appears in the job summary. Options:

- uses: ayushanand27/leakkill@v0
  with:
    path: .               # files or directories to scan
    exclude-tests: true   # skip test_* files and tests/ dirs
    history: true         # scan every commit (needs `fetch-depth: 0` on checkout)
    verify: true          # check secrets with their providers; fail only if one is LIVE

The action exposes found (the number of unique secrets) as an output. Outside GitHub Actions, use pip install leakkill && leakkill scan ..

Findings in the GitHub Security tab (SARIF)

permissions:
  contents: read
  security-events: write   # needed to upload SARIF
steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v7
  - uses: ayushanand27/leakkill@v0
    id: leakkill
  - uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v4
    if: always()           # upload even when leakkill fails the build
    with:
      sarif_file: ${{ steps.leakkill.outputs.sarif-file }}

Outside the Action: leakkill scan --sarif results.sarif . (validated against the OASIS SARIF 2.1.0 schema). The SARIF never contains secrets, only a masked prefix and a truncated hash.

GitLab CI

leakkill:
  image: python:3.12-slim
  script:
    - pip install leakkill
    - leakkill scan --exclude-tests --sarif gl-leakkill.sarif .
  artifacts:
    when: always
    paths: [gl-leakkill.sarif]

Baselines: adopt it on a repo that already has old findings

leakkill scan --write-baseline .leakkill-baseline.json .   # accept what's there today
leakkill scan --baseline .leakkill-baseline.json .          # from now on, fail only on new secrets

The baseline file is safe to commit: it holds only salted scrypt hashes, never secrets, and scrypt is deliberately slow so even weak passwords can't practically be brute-forced back out of it. (Gitleaks' baseline is its previous report, which includes the secrets themselves.) Accepting a finding into the baseline doesn't make it safe: revoke real keys first.

Use with the pre-commit framework

# .pre-commit-config.yaml
repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/ayushanand27/leakkill
    rev: v0.7.2
    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

• Finds fewer real credentials than Betterleaks (recall 0.30 vs 0.38 on real code in CredData, with far fewer false alarms), and has fewer rules than Kingfisher or TruffleHog.
• Scans files, git history and local AI agent files: not Slack, Jira, Confluence, S3 or Docker images.
• The agent guard is pattern-based: a command that builds a file name at runtime can get past it. The Cursor, Copilot and Codex guards are tested against their documented hook formats; only Claude Code was tested in the real app. Copilot ignores prompt hooks, so a key typed into a Copilot prompt is warned about, not blocked.
• On very large repositories (tens of MB) scanning is about 2x slower than Gitleaks.
• 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.