Go Decrypt Jenkins

Over the past few years I’ve run into vulnerable Jenkins backups with anywhere from half a dozen to several hundred encrypted passwords, secrets, and keys to critical infrastructure. While there are a multitude of tools out there none of them behaved quite like I wanted, so I wrote my own and learned some Golang in the process.

The tool isn’t groundbreaking but it does do something I haven’t seen available else where, and that is the ability to decrypt files encrypted with Jenkins’ SecretBytes implementation offline - not using the Groovy console.

Go-Decrypt-Jenkins is on Github - https://github.com/thesubtlety/go-decrypt-jenkins.

master.key encrypts hudson.util.Secret

Back in 2014 someone did some code spelunking and reverse engineering and documented how Jenkins credentials were being encrypted along with a decryption script. That script is still being used today.

Basically, Jenkins has a master.key file which it uses to encrypt an secondary key. The secondary key is used to encrypt secret values. In the case of most Jenkins encrypted values, the secondary hudson.util.Secret key is used for encryption.

…and also encrypts SecretBytes.KEY

But in the case of files uploaded to the Credentials Manager in Jenkins, a different algorithm and secret key are used. The master.key is still used but the secondary key it encrypts is com.cloudbees.plugins.credentials.SecretBytes.KEY which is then used for file encryption.

Files encrypted with SecretBytes are tagged as such in credentials.xml. Searching Github shows the algorithms used for encryption and decryption in SecretBytes.java.

That SecretBytes implementation uses CredentialsConfidentialKey to create the cipher data as seen in the createCipher implementation here.

Decrypt all the things

And after working to understand how those algorithms worked, I rewrote them in Go.

Prior to this the easiest way to decrypt files encrypted with SecretBytes was to use the Groovy Console and run something like

println(new String(com.cloudbees.plugins.credentials.SecretBytes.fromString("{....}").getPlainData(), "ASCII"))

Now this can be done offline. Just point at a directory and go-decrypt-jenkins will do the rest.

% ./go-decrypt-jenkins -d jenkinsbackup/
scope: GLOBAL
id: 42e60ee3-fe19-4e3e-9eec-fec91e96e92e
username: jenkin
privateKey: -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIEpAIBAAKCAQEAx5T0czKNmNkA7k0mbBJkl8hTLAzy...

scope: GLOBAL
id: al2e8dee-afe1-e3be-b5e1-7e797e9a9ede
username: admin
password: Password123

https://github.com/thesubtlety/go-decrypt-jenkins