Many projects ask to share lots of logs when reporting issues. It’s difficult to go through all the logs and redact informarion such as usernames, environment variabled etc.
Any ideas on how to anonymize logs before sharing? Change your username to something generic?
I remember this mindset in myself. Today I consider it a waste of time.
If you rely on any tool for this, the tool will make mistakes you cannot accept. If you do it manually, you will make mistakes as well and that also does not work. Also, the information your consider worthy for removal might be key to understanding the problem.
Like, you remove your name, but a certain character in your name is what is actually tripping up the program.
Ultimately, don’t post your logs publicly. In the past years, I was always able to email logs to devs. I have no reason not to trust them with my log. If they want data from me, they could easily exfiltrate it through their actual application.
deleted by creator
It depends a lot on what the application is logging to begin with.
If a project prints passwords in logs, consider to just GTFO as it’s terrible security practice.
There might also be sensitive info that’s not coming from a static thing like your username, but from variable data such as IP addresses, gps coordinates, or whatever thing gets logged.
Meaning a simple find&replace might be insufficient.When possible, I tend to replace the info I remove with a short name of what I replaced out as it’s easier to understand context when it’s not all
**********or truncated.
example:proxy_container_1 | <redacted_client1_ip> - - [17/Aug/2024:12:39:06 +0000] "GET /u/<redacted_local_user2> HTTP/1.1" 200 963 "-" "Lemmy/0.19.4; +<redacted_remote_instance3_fqdn>"keeping the same placeholders for subsequent substitutions helps because if everything is the same, then you don’t know what’s what anymore.
(this single line would be easy enough either way, but if you have a bunch and can’t tell client1 from client50 apart anymore that can hinder troubleshooting.regular expressions are useful in doing that, but something that works on a specific set of logs might miss sensitive info in another.
I’m sure people have made tools to help with that, possibly with regex patterns for common stuff, but even with that, you’d need to doublecheck the output to be 100% sure.
It helps a lot when whatever app doesn’t log too much sensitive info to begin with, but that’s usually out of your hands as a user.
A quick google search found these:
deleted by creator
I agree with the other comment. Write a bash or Python script that replaces your username with something generic. That should do it most of the time. If the logs leak some other sensitive data then the developer fucked up. I always quickly scan logs for stuff I don’t want to share.
Just came here to say you could always look for alternative projects that have this built in as well. I’m not sure what logs you as looking at, but it might be best to contribute or request this feature directly for the software.
For example I use crowdsec and they have a button on the logs pages that will anonymize the entire page and is great for taking screenshots.
I agree with another poster that getting something to work with a number of different logs would be a huge undertaking and unrealistic for most solo devs. I do think asking whatever project could be a start. I’d love if journalctl and syslogd etc had a flag to anonymize the log output.
Personally often times I just open the screenshot in gimp and pixelate out the areas I want hidden, but that’s not an automated solution.
