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?
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 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.
“boosted” this for visibility. Perhaps random devs will take interest.
For me this typically involves doing a search&replace for my username, hostname, and IP addres(es)
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.
