Remove Leaked Git Emails

Find and remove publicly accessible git commit email addresses.

GitHub uses your commit email address to associate commits with your GitHub account. When a user makes commits to a public repository, their email address is pushed with the commit.

If you'd like to keep your personal email address private, you can use a GitHub-provided no-reply email address as your commit email address. GitHub provides some instructions on keeping your personal email address private, but it seems that GitHub users either don't know or don't care that their email address may be exposed.

However, any commits you made before changing your commit email address are still associated with your previous email address. This is why this repository exists. The script will clone all accessible repositories, change the committer email from all commits and push it back to GitHub.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• This email_fix.py script is meant to run on Linux. If you're using Windows 10 and above, I recommend running Ubuntu via WSL. You can follow the documentation from Microsoft to install WSL. What things you need to run the program:
• Python3 and PIP can be installed using APT package manager by running:

  sudo apt install python3 python3-pip

• Install the following Packages from PyPi by using the following commands:

  pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Usage

• First, we need to generate a personal access token that will allow us to authenticate against the API. We can get one at https://github.com/settings/tokens and by clicking on Generate new token. Select Repo and User scopes for the token.
• Rename .env.sample to .env and populate the appropriate values.
• Run retrieve_email.py to check for all leaked email addresses. This script uses recent events via the GitHub API to find the leaked email addresses. An example screenshot is attached:

  • python3 retrieve_email.py

  • 
• Once you identified the leaked email addresses, populate them back to the .env file.
• Now, run email_fix.py to replace the committer email addresses with the CORRECT_EMAIL from .env (preferably the GitHub-provided no-reply email address). Changes might take up to 90 days to reflect in the GitHub Events API.
• Repeat the process if you have multiple leaked email addresses.
• GitHub Docs: Block commits you push from the command line that expose your personal email address

Notes

• The script does not preserve the SHA1s for previous tags, versions and objects.
• The retrieve_email.py uses GitHub Events API to scan for leaked email(s) which limits scanning upto 100 recent results per page
• TODO Each Git commits needs to be scanned for email(s). This will also increase coverage for git repositories outside GitHub.
• TODO Currently, works only on the HEAD or parent branch (master, main, etc). Will increase the scope to other branches if I have the time.

Acknowledgments

• Hat tip to anyone whose code was used.

Disclaimer

I shall not be liable for any consequential, incidental, direct, indirect, special, or other damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of business profits, business interruption, loss of business information, or other pecuniary loss). Run this at your own risk.  

Made with ❤️ by Krishnakanth Alagiri