This major version release brings multiple updates to GitLab Watchman in usability, functionality and behind the scenes improvements.

Added

• Support for centralised signatures from the Watchman Signatures repository
  • This makes it much easier to keep the signature base for all Watchman applications up to date, and to add functionality to GitLab Watchman with new signatures. New signatures are downloaded, and updates to existing signatures are applied, at runtime, meaning GitLab Watchman will always be using the most up to date signatures.
• Major UI overhaul
  • A lot of feedback said GitLab Watchman was hard to read. This version introduces new terminal optimised logging as a logging option, as well as JSON formatting. This formatting is now the default when running with no output option selected, and is a lot easier for humans to read. Also, colours!
• Enumeration options added
  • GitLab Watchman now gathers more information from an instance. Useful if your use case is more red than blue...
    • Instance metadata output to terminal
    • Information on the user you are authenticated as, and the token you are using, including what permissions it has.
    • All instance users output to CSV
    • All instance projects output to CSV
    • All instance groups output to CSV
• Option choose between verbose or succinct logging when using JSON output. Default is succinct.
• Debug logging option

Removed

• Local/custom signatures - Centralised signatures mean that user-created custom signatures can't be used with GitLab Watchman for Enterprise Grid anymore. If you have made a signature you think would be good for sharing with the community, feel free to add it to the Watchman Signatures repository, so it can be used in all Watchman applications

GitLab Watchman 2.0.0 - 2022-04-01

Added:

• New scopes for finding exposed data in:
  • notes
  • snippets
• Docker image now available from the Docker hub, or by building from source. (Credit @adioss for the inspiration)
• Complete rewrite of the codebase to make searching faster and more efficient.
  • More modern packaging and distribution.
• Logs now include more data
• Additional signatures added to find more leaked data
• Updated logo to play nicely with dark mode displays

Removed:

• Logging to file and TCP stream - logs to stdout like a true 12 factor app. Reroute stdout as you see fit. --output
• .conf file for configuration options. Pass the environment variables GITLAB_WATCHMAN_TOKEN and GITLAB_WATCHMAN_URL

Breaking changes:

• The --output flag is no longer required, and therefore not supported

GitLab Watchman 1.4.0 - 2020-12-24

Added:

• Refactor of rules into directories for easier management
• Multiprocessing implemented for searching for matches. GitLab Watchman now splits regex filtering between the cores available on the device, meaning the more cores you have, the faster searching should run.
• Handling for GitLab API rate limiting, backing off when the rate limit is hit. The rate limit may be more likely to come into effect with multiprocessing
• Rules added to search for:
  • Cloudflare tokens
  • Facebook API tokens
  • GitHub API tokens
  • Mailchimp API tokens
  • Mailgun API tokens
  • Shodan API tokens
  • Stripe API tokens
  • Twilio API tokens
  • Microsoft NuGet keys

1.3.0 - 2020-12-12

Added:

• Add more information about the namespaces a project is in to logs
• Added details owner of that namespace, for groups and users
• Time based searching now looks at the time a file was committed, not when a project was active, which greatly reduces multiples of the same detection because a project is active but a file has not been modified.
• Rules added:
  • SSH private keys
  • Mastercard datacash tokens
  • Heroku tokens
  • PagerDuty tokens

Removed:

• Enhanced logging that includes nested information, such as namespace owners, means that CSV logging is no longer practical. CSV logging has been removed and JSON via STDOUT is now the default option.

GitLab Watchman 1.2.0 - 2020-11-16

Added:

• More data on namespaces added to logs
• Better search queries for existing rules to filter out false positives

Removed:

• CICD variable search no longer works due to GitLab API now only allowing owners of a project to search it for variables. It has been removed.

Fixed:

• Bug on outputting match string for blobs/wiki-blobs

GitLab Watchman 1.1.0 - 2020-11-14

Fixed

• Retry added for occasional Requests HTTPSConnectionPool error

Added

• Exact regex string match added to output from message searches

Initial Release

GitLab Watchman is an application that uses the GitLab API to audit GitLab for sensitive data and credentials exposed internally.

Features

It searches GitLab for internally shared projects and looks at:

• Code
• Commits
• Wiki pages
• Issues
• Merge requests
• Milestones

For the following data:

• GCP keys and service account files
• AWS keys
• Azure keys and service account files
• Google API keys
• Slack API tokens & webhooks
• Private keys (SSH, PGP, any other misc private key)
• Exposed tokens (Bearer tokens, access tokens, client_secret etc.)
• S3 config files
• Passwords in plaintext
• CICD variables exposed publicly
• and more

Time based searching

You can run GitLab Watchman to look for results going back as far as:

• 24 hours
• 7 days
• 30 days
• All time

This means after one deep scan, you can schedule GitLab Watchman to run regularly and only return results from your chosen timeframe.