Insect Security Scanner

Safely analyze external Git repositories for malicious content before cloning or execution

🚨 What is Insect?

Insect is a security tool that helps you safely evaluate external Git repositories before cloning them to your system. It uses container-based isolation to analyze potentially malicious code without risk to your environment.

Primary Use Cases

• 🔍 Vet third-party repositories before cloning from GitHub/GitLab
• 🛡️ Detect malware and stealers in open-source projects
• 🐳 Analyze in isolation using Docker containers for safety
• 📊 Generate security reports on external dependencies

⚡ Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Docker (required for safe external repository analysis)
• Python 3.8+

Analyze External Repository (Recommended)

# Install Insect
pip install insect

# Safely analyze external repository before cloning
insect clone https://github.com/suspicious/repository

# Advanced: Scan with high sensitivity for comprehensive analysis
insect clone https://github.com/example/repo --scan-args "--sensitivity high"

# Generate detailed security report
insect clone https://github.com/vendor/tool --report-path security-analysis.json

Scan Local Code (Secondary Use Case)

# Scan local project (requires Docker for full features)
insect scan ./my-project --format html --output security-report.html

🔥 Key Features

• 🐳 Container Isolation: Analyze untrusted code safely in Docker
• 🔍 Comprehensive Detection: Find malware, credential stealers, crypto miners
• 🦄 Unicode Attack Detection: Detect sophisticated character-based obfuscation
• 🛡️ Pre-execution Analysis: Detect threats before code runs
• 📊 Detailed Reports: Interactive HTML reports with threat analysis
• ⚡ Multiple Formats: Text, JSON, HTML output options
• 🎛️ Configurable: Adjust sensitivity for different threat models

🎯 What Insect Detects

Malicious Patterns

• Browser Data Theft: Cookie stealers, password extractors, session hijackers
• Cryptocurrency Theft: Wallet stealers, private key extractors, clipboard hijackers
• System Compromise: Command injection, privilege escalation, backdoors
• Data Exfiltration: Secret harvesters, API key stealers, data miners
• Unicode Attacks: Homograph attacks, invisible characters, bidirectional text manipulation

Security Vulnerabilities

• Code Injection: SQL injection, XSS, command injection, path traversal
• Character-based Attacks: Unicode obfuscation, invisible backdoors, encoding abuse
• Insecure Configurations: Hardcoded credentials, weak settings
• Dependency Issues: Vulnerable libraries, supply chain risks

🦄 Advanced Unicode Attack Detection

Insect includes sophisticated detection for Unicode-based attacks that are invisible to human reviewers:

What It Detects

• Homograph Attacks: Mixed scripts (Cyrillic 'а' vs Latin 'a') in identifiers
• Invisible Characters: Zero-width spaces, format characters, hidden Unicode
• Bidirectional Text: Right-to-Left Override attacks that hide malicious code
• Encoding Abuse: Path traversal and injection via character encoding
• Malicious Filenames: Reserved device names and dangerous file patterns

Example Detection

# This looks like normal code but contains Cyrillic characters
def аuthenticate(user, password):  # 'а' is Cyrillic U+0430, not Latin!
    return True  # Bypasses real authentication

# Invisible character injection
def login​(user, pass):  # Zero-width space after 'login'
    steal_credentials(user, pass)​  # Another hidden character

Configuration

[analyzers.malicious_character]
enabled = true
sensitivity = "medium"  # Options: "low", "medium", "high"

🚀 Real-World Examples

Vetting Dependencies

# Check a JavaScript library before adding to your project
insect clone https://github.com/author/js-library --report-path security-analysis.json

# Analyze a Python package source
insect clone https://github.com/author/python-package --scan-args "--severity medium"

# Comprehensive analysis of suspicious repository
insect clone https://github.com/reported/malware --scan-args "--sensitivity very_high"

Security Research

# Analyze suspicious repository reported by community
insect clone https://github.com/suspicious/stealer --report-path investigation.json

# Generate detailed report for security review
insect clone https://github.com/questionable/project --scan-args "--format html"

Team Integration

# Security team validation workflow
insect clone https://github.com/vendor/tool --report-path vendor-assessment.json

# Developer pre-integration check
insect clone https://github.com/library/candidate --scan-args "--severity medium"

🛡️ Safety First

Never run untrusted code directly! Always use Insect's container-based scanning:

# ✅ Safe: Analyze in container first
insect clone https://github.com/untrusted/repo

# ❌ Dangerous: Don't clone and run unknown code
git clone https://github.com/untrusted/repo && cd repo && ./install.sh

📖 Documentation

• Quick Start Guide - Get started with external repository scanning
• External Scanning - Comprehensive guide for analyzing untrusted repos
• Threat Detection - Examples of malicious patterns detected
• Container Security - Docker-based isolation setup
• Dependency Vetting - Security team workflows
• Internal Scanning - Using Insect for your own code

🔧 Requirements

• Docker: Required for safe analysis of external repositories
• Python 3.8+: For running Insect
• Internet: For cloning external repositories

💡 Why Use Insect?

In today's threat landscape, malicious repositories are increasingly common:

• Supply chain attacks through compromised packages
• Fake repositories designed to steal credentials
• Crypto miners disguised as legitimate tools
• Browser stealers targeting developer machines

Insect helps you stay safe by analyzing code before it touches your system.

Installation

pip install insect

Or using pipenv:

pipenv install insect

Additional Commands

Check status of external dependencies:

insect deps

For more advanced usage and configuration options, see our documentation.

Development

Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/somasays/insect.git
cd insect

# Setup development environment
pipenv install --dev
pipenv shell

# Install pre-commit hooks
pre-commit install

Testing

# Run tests
pytest

# Run tests with coverage
pytest --cov=insect

# Run tox to test across different Python versions
tox

Code Quality

# Format code
black .
isort .

# Lint code
ruff .

# Type checking
mypy .

For detailed development workflows, see our contributing guide.

License

MIT

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Insect - Analyze first, trust later.