🛡️ PiiScrubber

PiiScrubber is a high-performance, pluggable Ruby gem for detecting and sanitizing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and API secrets from strings, nested data structures, Rails logs, Faraday HTTP requests, and LLM prompt contexts.

✨ Features

✉️ Email Addresses (user@example.com → [REDACTED:EMAIL] or j***@e***.com)
📱 Phone Numbers (+1-800-555-0199 → [REDACTED:PHONE])
💳 Credit Cards (Supports Luhn algorithm checksum validation to eliminate false positives)
🪪 US Social Security Numbers (SSN) (123-45-6789)
🏦 International Bank Account Numbers (IBAN) (ISO 7064 Modulo-97 checksum validation for 80+ countries)
🇬🇧 UK National Insurance Numbers (NINO) (QQ 12 34 56 A)
🇨🇦 Canadian Social Insurance Numbers (SIN) (Luhn algorithm validated)
🇮🇳 Indian Identifiers:
- PAN Cards (ABCPE1234F with taxpayer status validation)
- Aadhaar Numbers (3675 9834 5017 with Verhoeff algorithm checksum)
🗄️ Database Connection Strings (postgres://user:pass@host:5432/db, mysql2://, mongodb://, redis://)
🔑 API Keys & Cloud Secrets (AWS Access Keys, OpenAI sk-, Anthropic sk-ant-, Hugging Face hf_, SendGrid SG., Twilio AC/SK, Mailgun key-, GitLab glpat-, GitHub ghp_, Stripe sk_live_, Bearer Tokens, RSA Private Keys)
🌐 IP Addresses (IPv4 & IPv6)
🌲 Data Structure Support: Recursively scrubs String, Hash, Array, and embedded JSON.
🔑 Sensitive Key Redaction: Automatically redacts values for hash keys matching sensitive terms (password, auth_token, secret, cvv, pin).
🌍 Regional Configuration Presets: Quick switch with :us, :uk, :eu, :ca, :in, :finance, :secrets, or :all.
🛠️ Integrations: Drop-in wrapper for Logger / Rails ActiveSupport::Logger, Faraday HTTP middleware, and Rack middleware.
💻 CLI Utility: Scrub log files directly from the command line (cat app.log | pii_scrubber).

📦 Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "pii_scrubber"

And then execute:

bundle install

🚀 Quick Start

1. Basic Usage

require "pii_scrubber"

# Simple String Scrubbing
PiiScrubber.scrub("Please contact Jane Doe at jane@example.com or call 555-123-4567.")
# => "Please contact Jane Doe at [REDACTED:EMAIL] or call [REDACTED:PHONE]."

# Nested Hash & Sensitive Key Redaction
payload = {
  user: {
    username: "john_smith",
    password: "mysecretpassword123", # Key matches sensitive key pattern
    email: "john.smith@gmail.com",
    api_key: "sk-proj-1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef12345678"
  }
}

PiiScrubber.scrub(payload)
# => {
#      user: {
#        username: "john_smith",
#        password: "[REDACTED:PASSWORD]",
#        email: "[REDACTED:EMAIL]",
#        api_key: "[REDACTED:API_KEY]"
#      }
#    }

2. Regional Presets & International PII

Easily configure detection for specific geographic regions or security profiles:

PiiScrubber.configure do |config|
  # Use regional preset (:us, :uk, :eu, :ca, :in, :finance, :secrets, or :all)
  config.use_preset(:eu)

  # Or selectively enable/disable detectors
  config.enable_detector(:iban, :uk_nino)
  config.disable_detector(:ip_address)
end

# Multi-country detection with checksum validation
text = "IBAN: GB82WEST12345698765432, SIN: 130-692-544, DB: postgres://user:secret@localhost/db"
PiiScrubber.scrub(text)
# => "IBAN: [REDACTED:IBAN], SIN: [REDACTED:CANADIAN_SIN], DB: [REDACTED:DATABASE_URL]"

3. Custom Rules & Proc Redaction Strategy

PiiScrubber.configure do |config|
  # Add custom rule via DSL
  config.add_rule(:employee_code, /EMP-\d{4}/)

  # Custom Proc strategy
  config.strategy = ->(match, detector_name) { "<HIDDEN_#{detector_name.to_s.upcase}>" }
end

PiiScrubber.scrub("Employee EMP-1234 email is test@company.com")
# => "Employee <HIDDEN_EMPLOYEE_CODE> email is <HIDDEN_EMAIL>"

4. 🤖 Reversible Anonymization Vault (For LLMs & APIs)

When sending user input to external LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) or third-party APIs, anonymize PII before sending the prompt and restore the real PII values when rendering the response back to the user:

# 1. Anonymize user prompt before sending to LLM
session = PiiScrubber.anonymize("Draft an email to Alice at alice@company.com or call 555-123-4567.")

session.text
# => "Draft an email to Alice at [PII_VAULT_EMAIL_a8f91234] or call [PII_VAULT_PHONE_b4c56789]."

# 2. Pass session.text to OpenAI / LLM
llm_response = "Confirmed! Email drafted for [PII_VAULT_EMAIL_a8f91234]."

# 3. Restore original PII into LLM output
restored_response = session.restore(llm_response)
# => "Confirmed! Email drafted for alice@company.com."

Redis / Session Storage Serialization

Vault sessions can be serialized and stored across asynchronous HTTP requests or background jobs:

# Save to Redis / Cache
redis.set("vault:#{session.id}", session.to_h.to_json)

# Restore in background worker
saved_hash = JSON.parse(redis.get("vault:#{session.id}"))
session = PiiScrubber::Vault::Session.from_h(saved_hash)
final_output = session.restore(async_llm_response)

pii_scrubber supports three redaction strategies:

:placeholder (Default): [REDACTED:EMAIL]
:mask: Partial masking (j***@g***.com or ************0366)
:hash: HMAC-SHA256 deterministic hash ([ANON:a3b1f9e8])

PiiScrubber.configure do |config|
  config.strategy = :mask
  config.mask_char = "*"
  config.detectors = [:email, :credit_card, :api_key]
  config.ignored_keys = [:company_email] # Skip scrubbing specific hash keys
end

PiiScrubber.scrub("Email: john@gmail.com")
# => "Email: j***@g***.com"

HMAC Anonymization Strategy

Useful when you need consistent anonymized tokens for tracking without revealing PII:

PiiScrubber.scrub("User email: john@gmail.com", strategy: :hash, hmac_salt: "my_secret_salt")
# => "User email: [ANON:c74d0e2b]"

3. Rails Logger Integration

Sanitize all Rails production logs automatically by updating config/environments/production.rb:

# config/environments/production.rb
Rails.application.configure do
  config.logger = ActiveSupport::Logger.new(STDOUT)
  config.logger.formatter = PiiScrubber::Integrations::LoggerFormatter.new
end

4. Faraday HTTP Client Integration

Prevent sensitive headers (Authorization, Cookie) and PII in request/response bodies from leaking into third-party services:

conn = Faraday.new(url: "https://api.example.com") do |faraday|
  faraday.use PiiScrubber::Integrations::FaradayMiddleware, strategy: :placeholder
  faraday.adapter Faraday.default_adapter
end

5. CLI Executable

PiiScrubber comes with a command-line tool to clean log files on standard input or file paths:

# Pipe stdin
echo "User email is test@example.com and IP is 192.168.1.100" | pii_scrubber

# Process file with masking strategy
pii_scrubber -s mask production.log

🧪 Running Tests

To run the test suite:

bundle exec rspec

📄 License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

pii_scrubber

Development

Runtime