django-scrubber 0.2.0

Data Anonymizer for Django

Django Scrubber

django_scrubber is a django app meant to help you anonymize your project's database data. It destructively alters data directly on the DB and therefore should not be used on production.

The main use case is providing developers with realistic data to use during development, without having to distribute your customers' or users' potentially sensitive information. To accomplish this, django_scrubber should be plugged in a step during the creation of your database dumps.

Simply mark the fields you want to anonymize and call the scrub_data management command. Data will be replaced based on different scrubbers (see below), which define how the anonymous content will be generated.

Installation

Simply run:

pip install django-scrubber

And add django_scrubber to your django INSTALLED_APPS. I.e.: in settings.py add:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
  ...
  'django_scrubber',
  ...
]

Selecting data to scrub

There are a few different ways to select which data should be scrubbed, namely: explicitly per model field; or globally per name or field type.

Adding scrubbers directly to model:

class MyModel(Model):
    somefield = CharField()

    class Scrubbers:
      somefield = scrubbers.Hash('somefield')

Adding scrubber globally, either by field name or field type:

# (in settings.py)

SCRUBBER_GLOBAL_SCRUBBERS = {
    'name': scrubbers.Hash,
    EmailField: scrubbers.Hash,
}

Model scrubbers override field-name scrubbers, which in turn override field-type scrubbers.

To disable global scrubbing in a specific model, simply set the field scrubber to None.

By default, django_scrubber will affect all registered apps. This may lead to issues with third-party apps if the global scrubbers are too general. This can be avoided with the SCRUBBER_APPS_LIST setting. Using this, you might for instance split your INSTALLED_APPS into multiple SYSTEM_APPS and LOCAL_APPS, then set SCRUBBER_APPS_LIST = LOCAL_APPS, to scrub only your own apps.

Finally just run ./manage.py scrub_data to destructively scrub the registered fields.

Built-In scrubbers

Hash

Simple hashing of content:

class Scrubbers:
  somefield = scrubbers.Hash  # will use the field itself as source
  someotherfield = scrubbers.Hash('somefield')  # can optionally pass a different field name as hashing source

Currently this uses the MD5 hash which is supported in a wide variety of DB engines. Additionally, since security is not the main objective, a shorter hash length has a lower risk of being longer than whatever field it is supposed to replace.

Lorem

Simple scrubber meant to replace TextField with a static block of text. Has no options.

class Scrubbers:
  somefield = scrubbers.Lorem

Concat

Wrapper around django.db.functions.Concat to enable simple concatenation of scrubbers. This is useful if you want to ensure a fields uniqueness through composition of, for instance, the Hash and Faker (see below) scrubbers.

The following will generate random email addresses by hashing the user-part and using faker for the domain part:

class Scrubbers:
  email = scrubbers.Concat(scubbers.Hash('email'), models.Value('@'), scrubbers.Faker('domain_name'))

Faker

Replaces content with the help of faker.

class Scrubbers:
  first_name = scrubbers.Faker('first_name')
  last_name = scrubbers.Faker('last_name')

The replacements are done on the database-level and should therefore be able to cope with large amounts of data with reasonable performance.

The Faker scrubber accepts a single required argument: the faker provider used to generate random data. All faker providers are supported and you can also register your own custom providers.

Locales

Faker will be initialized with the current django LANGUAGE_CODE and will populate the DB with localized data. If you want localized scrubbing, simply set it to some other value.

Idempotency

By default, the faker instance used to populate the DB uses a fixed random seed, in order to ensure different scrubbings of the same data generate the same output. This is particularly useful if the scrubbed data is imported as a dump by developers, since changing data during troubleshooting would otherwise be confusing.

This behaviour can be changed by setting SCRUBBER_RANDOM_SEED=None, which ensures every scrubbing will generate random source data.

Limitations

Scrubbing unique fields may lead to IntegrityErrors, since there is no guarantee that the random content will not be repeated. Playing with different settings for SCRUBBER_RANDOM_SEED and SCRUBBER_ENTRIES_PER_PROVIDER may alleviate the problem. Unfortunately, for performance reasons, the source data for scrubbing with faker is added to the database, and arbitrarily increasing SCRUBBER_ENTRIES_PER_PROVIDER will significantly slow down scrubbing (besides still not guaranteeing uniqueness).

Settings

SCRUBBER_GLOBAL_SCRUBBERS:

Dictionary of global scrubbers. Keys should be either field names as strings or field type classes. Values should be one of the scrubbers provided in django_scrubber.scrubbers.

Alternatively, values may be anything that can be used as a value in a QuerySet.update() call (like a Func), or a callable that returns such an object when called with a field name as argument.

Example:

SCRUBBER_GLOBAL_SCRUBBERS = {
    'name': scrubbers.Hash,
    EmailField: scrubbers.Hash,
}

SCRUBBER_RANDOM_SEED:

The seed used when generating random content by the Faker scrubber. Setting this to None means each scrubbing will generate different data.

(default: 42)

SCRUBBER_ENTRIES_PER_PROVIDER:

Number of entries to use as source for Faker scrubber. Increasing this value will increase the randomness of generated data, but decrease performance.

(default: 1000)

SCRUBBER_SKIP_UNMANAGED:

Do not attempt to scrub models which are not managed by the ORM.

(default: True)

SCRUBBER_APPS_LIST:

Only scrub models belonging to these specific django apps. If unset, will scrub all installed apps.

(default: None)

Making a new release

bumpversion is used to manage releases.

Add your changes to the CHANGELOG and run bumpversion <major|minor|patch>, then push (including tags)

0.2.0 - Add scrubber concatenation

• Add scrubbers.Concat to make simple concatenation of scrubbers possible

0.1.4 Markdown readme

• Make our README look beautiful on PyPI

0.1.3 - Fix import

• fixed import issue #1 - Thanks to Charlie Denton

0.1.2 - Bumpversion support

• Use bumpversion and travis to make new releases

0.1.1 - Project renaming

• add pip package
• rename project: django_scrubber → django-scrubber

0.1.0 - First release

• initial working release