alter pre gate to handle multiline secrets - #296
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important
This optimization is controlled by the DETECT_SECRETS_PERF_PREGATE environment variable, which defaults to off. To enable it, set DETECT_SECRETS_PERF_PREGATE=1 in the environment before running the scan (e.g. shell export, Dockerfile ENV, or CI job variable) — no code changes are needed.
scan.pyuses a pre-gate to skip lines that "obviously" can't contain a secret, before running the full (slower) plugin set on the remaining lines.The previous gate was a single hand-written regex (
_TRIGGER_PATTERN) that approximated each detector's trigger condition from memory. Because it was hand-transcribed rather than derived from the actual detectors, it drifted from them and silently skipped lines that did contain real secrets.That's a false negative — the worst possible failure mode for a secrets scanner.
False negatives found in the old gate
Case
Fix
The gate is now built generically from the plugins actually loaded for the current scan, instead of hand-transcribed (
gate.py):