Tracewatch

tracewatch

Observability, tracking, and root-cause for the Security Wave.

The Security Wave tools (hookcheck, actionpin, injectcheck, mcpvet, depguard, flowcheck) answer "what is wrong right now, in this one scan." tracewatch is the wave's memory and stopwatch. It ingests their JSON reports over time and answers the questions an incident actually turns on:

• What changed since the last scan? Did a pin silently regress to a mutable tag? Did the ref under an already-pinned action move? That move is the tj-actions shape from March 2025: a tag retargeted under every repo that trusted it, invisible to anyone who only ever ran one scan.
• Where did this finding come from? tracewatch blames a finding to the commit that introduced it (git pickaxe on the finding's own content) and to the pull request that carried it, and labels every statement confirmed, inferred, or not established.
• How fast do we notice? Watch mode scans new issues, PRs, files, and tree changes on arrival and records time-to-detect for each one, so "early detection" is a measured number. The comparison point matters: hosted AI firewalls detect at prompt time, after the agent has already read the content. tracewatch detects at rest and on arrival, before any agent session exists.
• Is the estate getting better? Verdict trends, open findings by tool and severity, mean time open for resolved findings, and detection latency stats, per repo, over the whole scan history.

Deterministic, offline-first, local store you can grep. No hosted backend, no account, no telemetry.

Install

npx -y @reneturcios/tracewatch --version

npm install -g @reneturcios/tracewatch docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/tracewatch mcp

Quick start

# scan a repo with all six tools and start tracking it

tracewatch ingest ~/src/myrepo

what changed since the previous scan?

tracewatch diff myrepo

where did this finding come from?

tracewatch blame myrepo --finding tw_0123456789abcdef

health over time

tracewatch report myrepo

watch a directory and scan new content on arrival

tracewatch watch ~/src/myrepo --interval 30

What it tracks

Every ingest stores one scan record (timestamp, tool versions, verdicts, git HEAD) plus one observation per finding. Findings carry stable IDs: a hash of tool, rule, normalized location, and a content signature. The same finding keeps its identity across scans and tool versions; a content edit keeps the identity and changes the ID version, which is what diff reports as CHANGED.

Diff groups: NEW, RESOLVED, CHANGED (with field-level old to new), verdict moves, and REF EVENTS. A ref event fires whenever an action's ref or classification moves, with both values spelled out:

• pin-regression: PINNED to MUTABLE or BRANCH
• pin-improvement: MUTABLE or BRANCH to PINNED
• ref-move: the ref changed inside one classification (for a pinned action, the SHA itself moved)

Blame (root cause)

tracewatch blame myrepo --rule CURL-PIPE-SH --file package.json

tracewatch blame myrepo --finding tw_0123456789abcdef --json

Evidence is labeled, never blended:

• CONFIRMED: the introducing commit from git log -S on the finding's needle in your local clone; the current-line commit from git blame; the PR association from the GitHub API (commits/{sha}/pulls) when the clone has a GitHub remote; ref history and first/last seen from the store itself.
• INFERRED: circumstantial statements, written as inferences (for example, when the introducing commit and the current-line commit differ, the line was rewritten later without introducing the content).
• NOT ESTABLISHED: whatever could not be proven, with the reason (no clone recorded, no GitHub remote, API unreachable). Provenance is never guessed to fill the page.

Watch and time-to-detect

tracewatch watch ~/src/myrepo --interval 60 --alerts alerts.jsonl

tracewatch watch owner/repo --path ~/src/myrepo-clone --interval 60

Local mode polls a directory: new or changed text files are scanned with injectcheck the poll they appear in; a git HEAD move triggers a full ingest plus diff. GitHub mode polls an owner/repo slug: new issues and PRs are scanned on arrival, HEAD moves are recorded (and scanned when you pass a local clone with --path). Every detection writes a record with time-to-detect = detection time minus the content's own creation time (issue created_at, commit time, file birth time). State checkpoints after every cycle, so a restarted watch resumes without re-alerting history. Alerts stream as JSONL to stdout and to the --alerts file.

Polling is the portable fallback. The fastest path is event-driven, in CI:

name: tracewatch-issues

on: issues: types: [opened, edited] pull_request: types: [opened, edited, synchronize] permissions: contents: read jobs: scan-new-content: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps:

• uses: actions/checkout@11bd71901bbe5b1630ceea73d27597364c9af683 # v4
• uses: actions/setup-node@49933ea5288caeca8642d1e84afbd3f7d6820020 # v4 with: node-version: 24
• name: Scan the new issue or PR body on arrival env: BODY: ${{ github.event.issue.body || github.event.pull_request.body }} run: | printf '%s' "$BODY" > /tmp/body.md npx -y @reneturcios/injectcheck file /tmp/body.md --json > /tmp/report.json npx -y @reneturcios/tracewatch import ${{ github.repository }} --report injectcheck=/tmp/report.json

Known limit, stated plainly: GitHub watch mode reads through the local ghapi helper, whose output truncates long responses; an issue poll that cannot be parsed in full is logged as a watch note and retried next cycle rather than partially trusted. The CI pattern above has no such limit and is the recommended production path for issue scanning.

Reports

tracewatch report myrepo          # human

tracewatch report myrepo --json # machine tracewatch findings myrepo --tool hookcheck --status open

The health report carries the verdict trend across every scan, open findings by tool and severity, resolved count, mean time open for resolved findings (first-seen scan to the scan where the finding disappeared), all ref events, and detection latency stats (count, median, max, by kind).

MCP

tracewatch mcp serves a stdio MCP server with seven tools:

Store

Append-only JSONL under ~/.tracewatch (override with --store or TRACEWATCH_STORE): scans.jsonl, findings.jsonl, detections.jsonl, alerts.jsonl, plus watch-state.json checkpoints. Plain text on purpose. Finding status is derived from the observation series on every read, never stored as mutable state, so the store cannot disagree with itself. Identical store state always renders identical diff and report output.

Exit codes: 0 success or no changes, 1 a diff found changes, 2 usage error or total failure, 141 the reader closed the output pipe before the report was delivered.

Honesty rules

• A verdict is a scan result, never a safety claim. tracewatch reports what the six tools found and when; it does not certify a repo clean.
• Time-to-detect is measured against the content's own timestamps and recorded per detection; the report shows the distribution, not a best case.
• Blame separates confirmed evidence from inference and says "not established" out loud.

depguard scope note

depguard findings only exist relative to a comparison: a dependency was added, removed, or changed against a base. tracewatch preserves that context end to end. Every depguard finding carries the base (a git ref, a directory path, or none), the head path, the run mode, and its per-finding change kind and version move, and the scan record carries the same context at scan level, so a diff can say what changed against what.

Direct-run ingest (tracewatch ingest) runs depguard in its offline snapshot mode against the bare target, which surfaces manifest and lockfile findings (including typosquat suspects) with base recorded as none. A full base/head comparison needs a base the bare target does not name: run depguard with --base or --base-path yourself and import the report (tracewatch import --report depguard= ), and the diff context lands in the store with the findings.

MIT. Part of the Security Wave: hookcheck (persistence hooks), actionpin (Actions pinning), injectcheck (prompt injection in agent-read content), mcpvet (MCP server and skill vetting), depguard (dependency change guard), flowcheck (workflow permission hardening), tracewatch (observability and root cause).