# gitleaks v8.27.0

- Product: gitleaks (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/gitleaks)
- Vendor: Zachary Rice
- Date: 2025-06-01
- Version: v8.27.0
- Original notes: https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks/releases/tag/v8.27.0
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/gitleaks/releases/v8.27.0
- Labels: Platforms: Desktop

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

---

- **added** — Archive support with automatic extraction and scanning of zip files and tarballs using the --max-archive-depth flag
- **added** — Recursive archive scanning with configurable recursion limit via --max-archive-depth
- **fixed** — Reduce aws-access-token false positives
- **changed** — Set pass_filenames to false for Docker hook
- **fixed** — Unicode decoding
- **added** — Diagnostics feature
- **changed** — Include decoder in debug log

##### Changelog
* 782f310 Archive support (#1872)
* 489d13c Update README.md
* d29ee55 Reduce aws-access-token false positives (#1876)
* 611db65 Set `pass_filenames` to `false` for Docker hook (#1850)
* 0589ae0 unicode decoding (#1854)
* 82f7e32 Diagnostics (#1856)
* f97a9ee chore: include decoder in debug log (#1853)

Got another @bplaxco release. Cheers! 

###### Archive Scanning

Sometimes secrets are packaged within archive files like zip files or tarballs,
making them difficult to discover. Now you can tell gitleaks to automatically
extract and scan the contents of archives. The flag `--max-archive-depth`
enables this feature for both `dir` and `git` scan types. The default value of
"0" means this feature is disabled by default.

Recursive scanning is supported since archives can also contain other archives.
The `--max-archive-depth` flag sets the recursion limit. Recursion stops when
there are no new archives to extract, so setting a very high max depth just
sets the potential to go that deep. It will only go as deep as it needs to.

The findings for secrets located within an archive will include the path to the
file inside the archive. Inner paths are separated with `!`.

Example finding (shortened for brevity):

```
Finding:     DB_PASSWORD=8ae31cacf141669ddfb5da
...
File:        testdata/archives/nested.tar.gz!archives/files.tar!files/.env.prod
Line:        4
Commit:      6e6ee6596d337bb656496425fb98644eb62b4a82
...
Fingerprint: 6e6ee6596d337bb656496425fb98644eb62b4a82:testdata/archives/nested.tar.gz!archives/files.tar!files/.env.prod:generic-api-key:4
Link:        https://github.com/leaktk/gitleaks/blob/6e6ee6596d337bb656496425fb98644eb62b4a82/testdata/archives/nested.tar.gz
```

This means a secret was detected on line 4 of `files/.env.prod.` which is in
`archives/files.tar` which is in `testdata/archives/nested.tar.gz`.

Currently supported formats:

The [compression](https://github.com/mholt/archives?tab=readme-ov-file#supported-compression-formats)
and [archive](https://github.com/mholt/archives?tab=readme-ov-file#supported-archive-formats)
formats supported by mholt's [archives package](https://github.com/mholt/archives)
are supported.