The creator of the widely popular Gitleaks tool has launched a new open-source secrets scanner called Betterleaks.

Sponsored by Aikido Security, this modern tool is a faster, highly configurable successor that detects exposed credentials across directories, files, and Git repositories.

Gitleaks has become an industry standard, with over 26 million downloads, and is used by hackers, developers, and global security teams.

However, after losing administrative control over the original Gitleaks repository, the creator decided to build a fresh, improved scanner from the ground up.

Gitleaks Becomes the Most Popular Secrets Scanner on GitHub (source: aikido)

Betterleaks operates as a direct, drop-in replacement for its predecessor. This means existing command-line interface (CLI) options and configurations will work immediately out of the box.

The project is released under the MIT license and maintained by a team of four security experts with experience at Red Hat, Amazon, and RBC.

This shared governance model ensures long-term stability and a community-driven development roadmap. To further develop the project, the creator joined Aikido Security as Head of Secrets Scanning.

Aikido Security now officially sponsors the project, while Betterleaks remains fully independent and open-source under the MIT license.

The collaboration is based on a shared vision with Aikido’s CTO to build the best open-source secrets scanner available.

Betterleaks Scanner

Betterleaks introduces several major improvements to detection speed and accuracy.

The version 1.0 release includes the following features:

Token Efficiency Scanning: Instead of relying on standard entropy to find candidate secrets, the tool uses a technique based on BPE tokenization. This method achieves an impressive 98.6% recall rate, vastly outperforming older entropy-based techniques.

Rule-Defined Validation: Validation logic is written using the Common Expression Language (CEL), making it much simpler for the community to write rules for newly emerging service providers.

Pure Go Architecture: The scanner runs entirely on Go, without relying on CGO or Hyperscan, enabling security teams to deploy it anywhere seamlessly.

Default Encoding Detection: The tool automatically handles secrets that are deeply hidden by double or triple encoding.

Parallelized Git Scanning: By enabling parallel processing, Betterleaks scans Git repositories significantly faster than existing alternatives.

Expanded Rule Coverage: New provider rules are continuously being added, with an open contribution model through GitHub pull requests.

While the current release focuses on improving the core secrets-scanning experience, the development team has ambitious plans.

The roadmap for Betterleaks v2 includes several significant additions. The team plans to expand scanning sources beyond Git repositories and files, add LLM-assisted secret classification using anonymized data, support auto-revocation of exposed credentials via provider APIs, and introduce permissions mapping to determine what access a leaked secret actually grants.

Additional performance optimizations and a flattened, CEL-based configuration system are also planned, with full backward compatibility guaranteed.

Betterleaks is explicitly designed to operate within AI-driven development environments. Platforms like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor frequently invoke CLI tools such as grep to retrieve targeted information without consuming excessive token budgets.

Betterleaks offers the same utility that developers and security teams can define as a tool for their AI agents, enabling automated scanning of generated code or enrichment of bug bounty workflows when interesting files are encountered.

The project is maintained by four contributors, including a Director of Software Development from RBC’s Global Security group, a Senior Information Security Analyst from Red Hat’s incident response team, and a software engineer from Amazon focused on high-performance systems. This multi-maintainer model is intended to ensure long-term project stability and open governance.

Betterleaks is available at GitHub and joins Aikido’s broader portfolio of open-source security tools.

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