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?
For me this typically involves doing a search&replace for my username, hostname, and IP addres(es)
This is the correct answer. Private IPs are less concerning (on noes now someone knows a network in my homelab is 10.0.0.1/24!) - but absolutely change public IPs in logs.
If it’s necessary to reference external users/systems in multiple log files, I’ll change the names to user1, user2, server1, db2, etc
This can also be mitigated by using a username and/or hostname that doesn’t leak private data.
No need to make your username your real name, or make your hostname contain anything more revealing than say “living room thinkpad”
Counterpoint: https://xkcd.com/910/
Also, both hostname and username might fit a company schema that you want to anonymize.
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.
This is the best advice. There’s nothing to be gained from having your info. I have sent logs to many independent devs / shops and have no fear about it. Having spent years looking at other peoples’ logs, I can tell you that people only care about resolving bugs to make their jobs easier.
This is admittedly a bit pedantic but it’s not that the risk doesn’t exist (there may be quite a lot to gain from having your info). It’s because the risk is quite low and the benefit is worth the favorable gamble. Not dissimilar to discussing deeply personal health details with medical professionals. Help begins with trust.
There’s an implicit trust (and often an explicit and enforceable legal agreement in professional contexts (trust, but verify)) between sys admins and troubleshooters. Good admins want quiet happy systems and good devs want to squash bugs. If the dev also dons a black hat occasionally they’d be idiotic to shit where they eat. Not many idiots are part of teams that build things lots of people use.
edit: ope replied to the wrong comment
Pro tip: name your user user and set your hostname to PC
What would be the most common username and hostname?
Are there even any default usernames in distros?
As for hostname, I think Debian defaults to debian.
Yeah but that reveals your distro. Default is nowhere used I think, but I think “PC” is a good default.
And “user” is for sure the default username
Sure that reveals your distro, but also consider what is in the logs you’re sharing. If you’re asking for help you probably also already said that you’re running Debian. Or the logs are full of apt logs already, querying a well known Debian mirror.
You’re right that PC is a fine default, but think about the whole picture as well.
A tool would actually be so good to have, it’s such a common thing that we don’t even think about it much. You sparked my curiosity so I tried to search if there was one and it seems there is a project out there: loganon, though it’s long dead unfortunately
The problem is there’s likely not a universal solution that’s guaranteed to clean everything in every case.
Cleaning specific logs/configs is much easier when you know what you’re dealing with.
Something like anonymizing a Cisco router config is easy enough because it folllows a known format that you can parse and clean.
Building a tool to anonymize some random logs from a specific software is one thing, anonymizing all logs from any software is unlikely.
Either way, it should always be double-checked and tailored to what’s being logged.
I agree, besides basic patterns to search for, that will most likely be necessary. In fact looking a bit more at this tool, it has a list of “rules” tailored to each software specifically, I guess this could be sustainable really only if a repository of third party extensions was kept so that anyone could contribute and the pool of rules expanded progressively
I wonder if you could do something with heuristics or a micro LLM to flag words that might be expected to be private.
I would be curious if someone could do a proof of concept with the Ollama self-hosted model. Like if you feed it with examples of names, IP addresses, API-key-like-strings, and others, it might be able to read through the whole file and then flag anything with a risk level greater than some threshold.
Know your log and then make a python script to replace the info you wanna hide
