micksmix's comments

I'm curious how Kingfisher would do against the proprietary dataset: https://github.com/mongodb/kingfisher

Any chance you could try and share results? Full disclosure, I built Kingfisher

Loved this “lead bullets” framing, especially the parts on taint checking, scanners, and pre-processing/sampling logs. One practical add-on to the "Sensitive data scanners" section is verification: can you tell which candidates are actually live creds?

We’ve been working on an open source tool, Kingfisher, that pairs fast detection (Hyperscan + Tree-Sitter) with live validation for a bunch of providers (cloud + common SaaS) so you can down-rank false positives and focus on the secrets that really matter. It plugs in at the chokepoints this post suggests: CI, repo/org sweeps, and sampled log archives (stdin/S3) after a Vector/rsyslog hop.

Examples:

  kingfisher scan /path/to/app.log --only-valid
  kingfisher scan --s3-bucket my-logs --s3-prefix prod/2025/09/

Baselines help keep noise down over time.

Repo: https://github.com/mongodb/kingfisher (Apache-2.0)

Disclosure: I help maintain Kingfisher.

That makes a lot of sense. I wish you the best of luck and will be happy to try it out as you continue to develop it!

One of the main benefits of Semgrep is its unified DSL that works across all supported languages. In contrast, using the Go module "smacker/go-tree-sitter" can expose you to differences in s-expression outputs due to variations and changes in independent grammars.

I've seen grammars that are part of "smacker/go-tree-sitter" change their syntax between versions, which can lead to broken S-expressions. Semgrep solves that with their DSL, because it's also an abstraction away from those kind of grammar changes.

I'm a bit concerned that tree-sitter s-expressions can become "write-only" and rely on the reader to also understand the grammar for which they've been generated.

For example, here's a semgrep rule for detecting a Jinja2 environment with autoescaping disabled:

  rules:
  - id: incorrect-autoescape-disabled
    patterns:
      - pattern: jinja2.Environment(... , autoescape=$VAL, ...)
      - pattern-not: jinja2.Environment(... , autoescape=True, ...)
      - pattern-not: jinja2.Environment(... , autoescape=jinja2.select_autoescape(...), ...)
      - focus-metavariable: $VAL

  

Now, compare it to the corresponding tree-sitter S-expression (generated by o3-mini-high):

  (
    call
      function: (attribute
                  object: (identifier) @module (#eq? @module "jinja2")
                  attribute: (identifier) @func (#eq? @func "Environment"))
      arguments: (argument_list
                    (_)*
                    (keyword_argument
                      name: (identifier) @key (#eq? @key "autoescape")
                      value: (_) @val
                        (#not-match @val "^True$")
                        (#not-match @val "^jinja2\\.select_autoescape\\("))
                    (_)*)
  ) @incorrect_autoescape

People can disagree, but I'm not sure that tree-sitter S-expressions as an upgrade over a DSL. I'm hoping I'm proven wrong ;-)

This is a really interesting project!

I'd love to hear how this project differs from Bearer, which is also written in Go and based on tree-sitter? https://github.com/Bearer/bearer

Regardless, considering there is a large existing open-source collection of Semgrep rules, is there a way they can be adapted or transpiled to tree-sitter S-expressions so that they may be reused with Globstar?