Pillager

Pillage filesystems for sensitive information with Go.

Table of Contents

1. Summary
2. Installation
3. Usage
4. Documentation

Summary

Pillager is designed to provide a simple means of leveraging Go's strong concurrency model to recursively search directories for sensitive information in files. Pillager does this by standing on the shoulders of a few giants. Once pillager finds files that match the specified pattern, the file is scanned using a series of concurrent workers that each take a line of the file from the job queue and hunt for sensitive pattern matches. The available pattern filters can be defined in a rules.toml file or you can use the default ruleset.

Installation

Go

If you have Go setup on your system, you can install Pillager with go get

go get github.com/brittonhayes/pillager

Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add pillager https://github.com/brittonhayes/pillager-scoop.git
scoop install pillager

Homebrew (OSX/Linux)

brew tap brittonhayes/homebrew-pillager
brew install pillager

Docker Image

docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/brittonhayes/pillager:latest hunt .

If you're looking for a binary, check the latest releases for the executable that matches your system

Usage

To see all the commands available with pillager

# To see instructions for the entire application
pillager

# From any subcommand
pillager [cmd] --help

User Interface

Pillager provides a terminal user interface built with bubbletea if you'd like to scan for secrets interactively.

Configuration

Gitleaks Rules

Pillager provides full support for Gitleaks¹ rules. This can either be passed in with a rules.toml² file, or you can use the default ruleset by leaving the rules flag blank.

# rules.toml
title = "pillager rules"

[[rules]]
id = "gitlab-pat"
description = "GitLab Personal Access Token"
regex = '''glpat-[0-9a-zA-Z\-\_]{20}'''

[[rules]]
id = "aws-access-token"
description = "AWS"
regex = '''(A3T[A-Z0-9]|AKIA|AGPA|AIDA|AROA|AIPA|ANPA|ANVA|ASIA)[A-Z0-9]{16}'''

# Cryptographic keys
[[rules]]
id = "PKCS8-PK"
description = "PKCS8 private key"
regex = '''-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----'''

Built-in Output Formats

Pillager has a series of built-in output formats available. Pick your flavor!

Basic

pillager hunt .

JSON

pillager hunt ./example -f json | jq

JSON output is designed to work seamlessly with the amazing jq utility for easy parsing.

Click to view more output formats

YAML

pillager hunt . -f yaml

TOML

pillager hunt . -f toml

HTML

pillager hunt . -f html > results.html

HTML Table

pillager hunt . -f html-table > results.html

Markdown

pillager hunt . -f markdown > results.md

Markdown Table

pillager hunt . -f table > results.md

Custom Go Template

pillager hunt . --template "{{ range .}}Secret: {{.Secret}}{{end}}"

Custom Go Template from File

pillager hunt . -t "$(cat pkg/templates/simple.tmpl)"

Custom Templates

Pillager allows you to use powerful go text/template to customize the output format. Here are a few template examples.

Basic

{{ range . -}}
    File: {{ .File }}
    Secret: {{ .Secret}}
    Description: {{ quote .Description }}
{{ end -}}

Markdown Styling

# Results

{{ range . -}}
    ## {{ .File }}
    - Location: {{.StartLine}}
{{end}}

More template examples can be found in the templates directory.

Documentation

📚 View the docs

GoDoc documentation is available on pkg.go.dev for pillager but it is also available for all packages in the repository in markdown format. Just open the folder of any package, and you'll see the GoDocs rendered in beautiful Github-flavored markdown thanks to the awesome gomarkdoc tool.

Development

To get involved developing features and fixes for Pillager, get started with the following:

• Install Go
• Install Taskfile.dev
• Read the CONTRIBUTING.MD

---

Shoulders of Giants ⭐

spf13's Cobra

What is Cobra?

Cobra is a library providing a simple interface to create powerful modern CLI interfaces similar to git & go tools. Cobra is also an application that will generate your application scaffolding to rapidly develop a Cobra-based application.

If you've seen a CLI written in Go before, there's a pretty high chance it was built with Cobra. I can't recommend this library enough. It empowers developers to make consistent, dynamic, and self-documenting command line tools with ease. Some examples include kubectl, hugo, and Github's gh CLI.

Gitleaks

What is Gitleaks?

Gitleaks¹ is a SAST tool for detecting hardcoded secrets like passwords, api keys, and tokens in git repos.

Gitleaks is an amazing tool for secret leak prevention. If you haven't implemented Gitleaks as a pre-commit checker, it's worth your time to check it out.

Why is Gitleaks relevant to Pillager?

Pillager implements the powerful rules functionality of Gitleaks while taking a different approach to presenting and handling the secrets found. While I have provided a baseline set of default rules, Pillager becomes much more powerful if you allow users to create rules for their own use-cases.

Check out the included rules² for a baseline ruleset.

---

This goes without saying but I'm going to say it anyways: I am not responsible for any repercussions caused by your use of pillager. This tool is intended for defensive use, educational use, and security researcher use with the consent of all involved parties. Malicious behavior with pillager is in no way condoned, nor encouraged. Please use this tool responsibly and ensure you have permission to scan for secrets on any systems before doing so.

At it's core, Pillager is designed to assist you in determining if a system is affected by common sources of credential leakage as documented by the MITRE ATT&CK³ framework.

MITRE ATT&CK Technique - T1552,003 - Unsecured Credentials: Bash History

MITRE ATT&CK Technique - T1552,001 - Unsecured Credentials: Credentials In Files

Footnotes

1. Gitleaks ↩ ↩²

2. Gitleaks Rules Reference ↩ ↩²

3. MITRE ATT&CK Website ↩