[slf4j-user] Hide "sensitive" data

[Norbert Kiesel]

Hi,


one of the common requirements for my team is to "hide" sensitive information in production logs, with a varying definition of sensitive.  One idea for this we had was to introduce another pattern in the format strings, and a global flag that handles that pattern differently.


Concrete example:  `logger.info("user {} has password {}", user, password);` is ok for debug, but not for production.  So instead we would use `logger.info("user {} has password $$", user, password);`, and based on some parameter this would be rendered as "user nkiesel has password secret" or "user nkiesel has password *hidden*".


This looks better than `logger.info("user {} has password {}, user, sensitive(password)";` and could also be slightly more efficient (because is would avoid invoking `sensitive` if threshold is higher than info).  However, this approach fails when the parameter is a Java object and only part of the `toString()` is sensitive. One idea to solve this would be to support a `SensitiveRenderer` interface with a "toString(boolean sensitve) method.  Then Java objects with sensitive data could override that.


Anyone out there who has an advice?  We have a rough implementation (with a `static public MessageFormatter.setSensitive(boolean arg);` to toggle the behavior) that passes the existing test cases (actually fails the perf tests right now because we used a Matcher.find based implementation that is 5 times slower), which we of course would be happy to share if anyone is interested.



</nk>

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Norbert Kiesel
Systems Architect | Engineering
MetricStream
2600 E. Bayshore Road | Palo Alto, CA - 94303
+1-650-620-2954 | nkiesel at metricstream.com | www.metricstream.com

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