Gitleaks step configuration

You can scan your code repositories using Gitleaks and ingest your results into Harness STO.

Important notes

This section describes recommended best practices and references to useful information.

Update your allowlist with inactive secrets

You can specify an allowlist of secrets that are inactive, rotated, deactivated, or false positives. Gitleaks ignores these secrets during a scan. Set up your allowlist in a .gitleaks.toml file and place it at the root of your repository.

note

It is best practice to update your allowlist with secrets that are inactive, rotated, deactivated, or false positives. Otherwise, Gitleaks will continue to detect these secrets in your commit history even after they have been updated in your code.

The following steps outline the recommended workflow:

Run a Gitleaks scan and review the detected passwords, tokens, and other secrets.
Rotate or deactivate all secrets that are currently active.
Compile a list of all secrets that are now inactive, rotated, deactivated, or false positives.
Update the allowlist in .gitleaks.toml to include these secrets.

Harness recommends that you add your secrets as plain text to the regexes array, as shown in this example. This is the most reliable method to ensure that Gitleaks detects only active secrets when you run another scan.

.gitleaks.toml example

title = "example gitleaks config"

[extend]
# useDefault will extend the base configuration with the default gitleaks config:
# https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks/blob/master/config/gitleaks.toml
useDefault = true

[allowlist]
# Recommended practice is to add your secrets to a regexes array, 
# not to a commits array.
regexTarget = "match"
description = "whitelist public and test secrets"
regexes = [
  '''1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef''',
  '''abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890''',
]

Redact secrets

Harness recommends that you configure the Gitleaks step to redact secrets in the log output.

Speed up your scans

To speed up your scan times, you can configure the Gitleaks step to limit the number of commits to scan. By default, Gitleaks scans the entire commit history.

Write custom detection rules

You can also write your own custom detection rules.

For examples, go to the default Gitleaks config.
If you want to contribute to the default configuration, go to the Contributing guidelines.
For information about advanced configurations, go to Stop leaking secrets - configuration.

For more information

The following topics contain useful information for setting up scanner integrations in STO:

Gitleaks step settings for STO scans

The recommended workflow is to add a GitLeaks step to a Security or Build stage and then configure it as described below.

Scan Mode

Ingestion Configure the step to read scan results from a data file and then ingest, normalize, and deduplicate the data.

Orchestration Configure the step to run a scan and then ingest, normalize, and deduplicate the results.

Scan Configuration

The predefined configuration to use for the scan. All scan steps have at least one configuration.

Target

Type

Repository Scan a codebase repo.

In most cases, you specify the codebase using a code repo connector that connects to the Git account or repository where your code is stored. For information, go to Configure codebase.

Target and variant detection

When Auto is enabled for code repositories, the step detects these values using git:

To detect the target, the step runs git config --get remote.origin.url.
To detect the variant, the step runs git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD. The default assumption is that the HEAD branch is the one you want to scan.

Note the following:

Auto is not available when the Scan Mode is Ingestion.
Auto is the default selection for new pipelines. Manual is the default for old pipelines, but you might find that neither radio button is selected in the UI.

Name

The identifier for the target, such as codebaseAlpha or jsmith/myalphaservice. Descriptive target names make it much easier to navigate your scan data in the STO UI.

It is good practice to specify a baseline for every target.

Variant

The identifier for the specific variant to scan. This is usually the branch name, image tag, or product version. Harness maintains a historical trend for each variant.

Workspace (repository)

The workspace path on the pod running the scan step. The workspace path is /harness by default.

You can override this if you want to scan only a subset of the workspace. For example, suppose the pipeline publishes artifacts to a subfolder /tmp/artifacts and you want to scan these artifacts only. In this case, you can specify the workspace path as /harness/tmp/artifacts.

Additionally, you can specify individual files to scan as well. For instance, if you only want to scan a specific file like /tmp/iac/infra.tf, you can specify the workspace path as /harness/tmp/iac/infra.tf

Ingestion File

The path to your scan results when running an Ingestion scan, for example /shared/scan_results/myscan.latest.sarif.

The data file must be in a supported format for the scanner.
The data file must be accessible to the scan step. It's good practice to save your results files to a shared path in your stage. In the visual editor, go to the stage where you're running the scan. Then go to Overview > Shared Paths. You can also add the path to the YAML stage definition like this:
```
    - stage:
      spec:
        sharedPaths:
          - /shared/scan_results
```

Log Level

The minimum severity of the messages you want to include in your scan logs. You can specify one of the following:

DEBUG
INFO
WARNING
ERROR

Additional CLI flags

Use this field to run the gitleaks scanner with additional CLI flags such as:

--redact --log-opts="-n 1000"

--redact redacts secrets in the log output.
--log-opts narrows the range of commits that Gitleaks scans in a Pull Request. For example, -n 1000 limits the scan to the last 1000 commits. You can also scan a range of commits using a command such as: tool_args : --log-opts=="--all commitA..commitF"

caution

Passing additional CLI flags is an advanced feature. Harness recommends the following best practices:

Test your flags and arguments thoroughly before you use them in your Harness pipelines. Some flags might not work in the context of STO.
Don't add flags that are already used in the default configuration of the scan step.

To check the default configuration, go to a pipeline execution where the scan step ran with no additional flags. Check the log output for the scan step. You should see a line like this:

Command [ scancmd -f json -o /tmp/output.json ]

In this case, don't add -f or -o to Additional CLI flags.

Fail on Severity

Every STO scan step has a Fail on Severity setting. If the scan finds any vulnerability with the specified severity level or higher, the pipeline fails automatically. You can specify one of the following:

CRITICAL
HIGH
MEDIUM
LOW
INFO
NONE — Do not fail on severity

Settings

You can use this field to specify environment variables for your scanner.

You can also use this field to speed up your Gitleaks scans.

Additional Configuration

The fields under Additional Configuration vary based on the type of infrastructure. Depending on the infrastructure type selected, some fields may or may not appear in your settings. Below are the details for each field

Override Security Test Image
- Container Registry
- Image Tag
Privileged
Image Pull Policy
Run as User
Set Container Resources
Timeout

Advanced settings

In the Advanced settings, you can use the following options:

Proxy settings

This step supports Harness Secure Connect if you're using Harness Cloud infrastructure. During the Secure Connect setup, the HTTPS_PROXY and HTTP_PROXY variables are automatically configured to route traffic through the secure tunnel. If there are specific addresses that you want to bypass the Secure Connect proxy, you can define those in the NO_PROXY variable. This can be configured in the Settings of your step.

If you need to configure a different proxy (not using Secure Connect), you can manually set the HTTPS_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY, and NO_PROXY variables in the Settings of your step.

Definitions of Proxy variables:

HTTPS_PROXY: Specify the proxy server for HTTPS requests, example https://sc.internal.harness.io:30000
HTTP_PROXY: Specify the proxy server for HTTP requests, example http://sc.internal.harness.io:30000
NO_PROXY: Specify the domains as comma-separated values that should bypass the proxy. This allows you to exclude certain traffic from being routed through the proxy.