Hi HN, I built CloneGuard after a fake recruiter had me run a “take-home” codebase on a call. I ran it once, stopped it, and later asked an AI tool to explain the code. It was a stealer going after SSH and AWS keys. I reported it to IT immediately, but it made me realize I had no quick way to vet a repo before touching it.

In these attacks the payload is often not the app itself. It’s an npm install script or a .vscode/tasks.json task that runs the moment you open the folder. So CloneGuard looks for exactly that kind of thing.

It’s a single Go binary with no dependencies, and it is read-only. It never runs, installs or imports anything from the project.

cloneguard clone https://github.com/someone/demo-app cloneguard scan ./some-folder

What it flags:

reads of SSH keys, cloud credentials (AWS, GCP, Azure, kube), browser data, wallets connections to raw IPs, webhooks, pastebins, tunnels download-and-run patterns (eval, curl | sh) auto-run hooks (npm scripts, VS Code tasks, setup.py) obfuscated code and committed binaries

A file that both reads secrets and talks to a suspicious server is escalated to “critical”. Exit codes (0-3) make it easy to drop into a script or git hook. The demo/ folder has a deliberately malicious sample you can try it on.

Limitations: it’s regex and heuristic based, so a determined attacker can evade it, and legitimate code (a password manager, for instance) can trigger false positives. “Clean” doesn’t mean safe. For code from strangers, still use a throwaway VM.

I’d love feedback on techniques it misses, false positives you hit, and rules you’d want added.

I thought it was common practice to keep a machine that one wipe clean after each interview.

In this day and age this is a bit like bringing a knife to a biocybernetic nanomaterial mimic fight. You will have much better results, with all untrusted software atp, instead of putting trust in a regex filter, asking any recent AI agent “I’m about to clone this repo, can you scan it for anything malicious/suspicious, phone-homes, possible hidden payloads, or secret update/c&c pathways?”

Even that is not guaranteed to keep you safe depending on the model used and the sophistication of the malware, but you’ll at least have a much better chance than a filtering tool. I am not being HN-paranoia-brained when I say it is the bare minimum for installing any software that comes from someone else, Github or an easily-compromised supply chain today.

> It’s an npm install script or a .vscode/tasks.json task that runs the moment you open the folder.

WTF. Is that really a thing?

autorun.inf called, it wants their method back.