anonymiser

Anonymise some values for showing to the "public"

Description.

Anonymiser allows a group of strings to be anonymised: that is converted into another set of string values.

Strings can be split into groups so that similar types of strings are anonymised together.

An example of this might be a program which is exposing database and table names from an internal company database server. Here we would like to anonymise the names being used but share the output of the screen with anonymous information.

All database names would be converted into db1, db2 ... dbn, and all table names converted into table1, table2 ... tablen.

Other similar use cases can be imagined.

An example: ps-top

In ps-top I wanted to anonymise the host, database and table names which were shown as they might expose internal information to third parties. This package made that easy.

There is basically one routine anonymise.Anonymise( "group", "some_name" ).

The first parameter is the name of the group of strings to be anonyised, The second parameter is the name to anonymise and basically each new name gets an id starting at 1. This id is added to the end of the group name and that's what is returned as the anonymised name.

e.g. To anonymise some database names:

• anonymise.Anonymise( "db", "my_db" ) --> db1
• anonymise.Anonymise( "db", "otherdb" ) --> db2
• anonymise.Anonymise( "db", "otherdb" ) --> db2
• anonymise.Anonymise( "db", "my_db" ) --> db1

To anonymise some table names:

• anonymise.Anonymise( "table", "important_name" ) --> table1
• anonymise.Anonymise( "table", "something_else" ) --> table2
• anonymise.Anonymise( "table", "important_name" ) --> table1

You can use as many prefixes as you like.

I guess in real code you'd do something like this:

var secret []string { ... } // holds strings of secrent information (maybe with duplicates)

... // fill secret with useful data

for i := range secret {
	fmt.Println( "secret:", secret[i], "==>", anonymise.Anonymise( "anonymised", secret[i] ) )
}

Installation

Install by doing:

• go get github.com/sjmudd/anonymiser

Documentation

Documentation can be found using godoc or at [https://godoc.org/github.com/sjmudd/anonymiser]