[slf4j-user] Hide "sensitive" data

[USHAKOV, Sergey]

Hi Norbert,

and I agree that hiding sensitive data is important for certain 
applications.

You have already mentioned that there are in fact two distinct cases:
1) when sensitive data is represented by a String;
2) when sensitive data is represented by an Object.

My feeling is that the second case is simpler and can be treated 
reasonably right away. In that case an approach is available with an 
application-specific MessageFormatter subclass. That subclass might be 
made aware of all the types that need sensitive data protection and use 
a sort of map of protection-aware formatting methods against data types.

The first case is more tricky, and I'm afraid thet we either have to 
sacrifice efficiency and use sensitive(password), or ask Ceki to 
consider some message pattern syntax extension... Maybe it's the time to 
ask Ceki to join... ;)

Regards,
Sergey


On 18.04.15 04:15, Norbert Kiesel wrote:
>
> 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>
>
> ---
>
>
> 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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