The command-line tool for Tracebit Community Edition. It deploys and maintains security canaries across your devices and accounts, and keeps them fresh so they stay convincing.
Free. MIT licensed.
1. Create a free account at community.tracebit.com. This is where deployed canaries and any alerts appear.
2. Download the installer for your platform from Releases.
3. Install it. Run the installer directly on Windows and macOS. On Linux, run
bash install-tracebit-linux in the directory where you downloaded the installer.
4. Deploy.
tracebit auth
tracebit deploy allFollow the prompts to complete browser and password-manager placement. The installer sets up background refresh for supported canary types.
A canary is a decoy credential or resource with no legitimate production use. An attempt to use a canary credential gives you a high-confidence signal to investigate. Credential canaries alert on use; simply reading or copying a local credential file does not itself trigger an alert.
The CLI deploys five kinds:
| Canary type | Where it sits | What it catches |
|---|---|---|
| AWS credentials | ~/.aws/credentials |
Use of harvested credentials by attackers, agents or processes |
| SSH keys | ~/.ssh |
Attempts to authenticate with the canary key |
| Browser cookies | Browser cookie store | Replay of a stolen canary session |
| Website passwords | Password manager (saved following the CLI prompts) | Attempts to log in with the canary credentials |
| Emails | Your inbox | Interaction with the canary content |
A person's workstation is often the first thing an attacker touches. Infostealer malware is built to scrape exactly the categories above: browser-saved sessions, password manager entries, SSH keys, cached credentials.
Endpoint tooling is built to recognise the malware's behaviour or signature, which means a new or well-obfuscated variant can get past it. A canary credential doesn't need to recognise the malware at all. It only needs to be the kind of thing a credential-harvester scrapes indiscriminately, and its use afterwards is the alert.
Detection does not rely on monitoring processes or file reads on the workstation. An alert fires when a canary credential is used, whether from that workstation or another machine.
Canaries can also reveal AI agents reaching beyond what they were asked to do.
An agent does not have to be malicious or compromised to be a problem. It only has to be resourceful. A coding agent troubleshooting a failing service can look for credentials to reproduce the issue without a clear boundary on which credentials it is entitled to use. Reading a local credential file can resemble ordinary developer activity. Classifying intent is hard. An attempt to use a credential with no legitimate purpose gives you a concrete event to investigate.
Two real Tracebit detections, anonymised. The second involved a canary deployed in cloud infrastructure, rather than by this workstation CLI:
An AI coding agent on a non-engineer's laptop. A canary AWS credential fired on the laptop of someone on a commercial team. The employee was using Claude Code to build an application, and the agent had attempted to use the canary credentials it found on the machine. Even though nothing malicious was happening, what the security team gained was visibility: agent usage outside engineering that they had no idea was occurring, a threat model that needed updating, and a concrete example to take to leadership.
An agent copying credentials out of a container. A user troubleshooting a service with an AI agent approved the agent's request to use that service's AWS credentials locally. The agent then ran a command on the Kubernetes container, printed its environment variables, copied the canary credentials down to the workstation, and tried to use them. The approval covered one thing. What the agent did went further, and the alert fired on use.
Canaries as a guardrail for AI adoption. Synthesia uses canaries to monitor AI coding agents for unexpected credential use. Their security team reports that the absence of alerts gives them confidence in the agents operating in those environments. A quiet canary means no monitored trigger was observed; it does not prove an agent stayed within scope or that no compromise occurred.
For the adversarial version of this problem, where the agent is the attacker rather than an over-eager assistant, see Tracebit's Context Bombs research.
- Infostealer malware. Credentials and session cookies harvested from a compromised workstation and later used.
- Session-token theft. A stolen browser session replayed from another machine.
- Lateral movement preparation. An attacker with a foothold attempting to use a canary SSH key to reach further.
- Insider collection. Someone with legitimate access attempting to use credentials they have no working reason to use.
Canaries are great at finding gaps in your existing tooling. An example: a customer had run Tracebit for about three months while holding off on one particularly sensitive cloud account. Three days after finally deploying canaries there, an application read one. Triage established that the application had been compromised for more than three years and was being used regularly to enumerate the environment. CSPM and EDR had both missed it.
- You authenticate the CLI against your free Community Edition account.
- The CLI requests canaries from the Tracebit API and places AWS credentials and SSH keys in local configuration files.
- It opens your browser to deploy browser cookies, prompts you to save website passwords in your password manager, and requests a canary email for your inbox.
- The installer sets up background refresh for supported canary types. Website passwords do not expire and are not automatically refreshed.
- If a canary credential is used, you get an alert.
Create an API token and use the Tracebit API to issue canaries programmatically. See the OpenAPI specification for the endpoints.
This CLI covers devices and accounts. For canaries across cloud accounts, identity providers, CI/CD pipelines and Kubernetes, see tracebit.com.
For CI/CD specifically, the Tracebit GitHub Action is also free and injects canary credentials into build pipelines, so a compromised dependency or third-party action can be detected when the planted credentials are used.
Common questions about canaries and deception technology are answered at ai.tracebit.com.
Issues and pull requests welcome.
MIT. See LICENSE.