CredentialWatch: a standard-library Python tool for finding expiring and unrotated credentials

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Development servers, build runners, and staging machines often accumulate forgotten secrets such as TLS certificates, JWTs, service account configs, and SSH keys. These files can expire silently and break scripts, or remain unrotated for months with overly permissive file permissions. A tutorial introduces CredentialWatch, a tool built solely on Python's standard library that scans directories for expiration dates, stale modification times, and dangerous permission bits. It parses certificate validity windows by decoding PEM content and reading ASN.1 time fields without external cryptographic libraries. Users can configure warning, critical, and staleness thresholds and receive an ASCII summary table of findings.

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