Mathematical Foundations: Shannon Entropy & Cyclomatic Graph Traversal

Static analysis tools often rely purely on naive regex pattern matching for credential discovery, resulting in false-positive fatigue. PR-XRay combines structural AST traversal with thermodynamic information theory.

Mathematical Secret Detection via Thermodynamic Shannon Entropy

High-entropy strings (e.g., base64 encoded private keys, AWS secret tokens, JWT signatures) have distinct non-random character probability distributions. We compute information entropy $\mathcal{H}(X)$ across all newly introduced token literals: