redact-env

🔒👀 redact-env

Redact values of critical environment variables in a string.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This library might not do exactly what you want it to.

As for anything related to security, read the caveats, check out the source code and the tests before using it in production.

Installation

$ yarn add redact-env
# or
$ npm i redact-env

Usage

import * as redactEnv from 'redact-env'

const secrets = redactEnv.build(['SECRET_ENV_VAR', 'MY_API_KEY'])

const unsafeString = `
  ${process.env.SECRET_ENV_VAR}
  Oh no, the secrets are leaking !
  ${process.env.MY_API_KEY}
`
console.log('unsafe:', unsafeString)

const safeString = redactEnv.redact(unsafeString, secrets)
console.log('safe:', safeString)

unsafe:
  QfKcO7cjGoxnLg/28/E7meEu2QaS/wNtFB7wlz+hDZA=
  Oh no, the secrets are leaking !
  d9fd627cfd3d6cb597e8faeb2ef0e4583af924aee047125479b2438ee2a18b67

safe:
  [secure]
  Oh no, the secrets are leaking !
  [secure]

Caveats

Un-redacted values

redact-env will NOT redact the following environment variable values:

• "true"
• "false"
• "null"

This is because these string-encoded JSON values are not specific to a single environment variable, and redacting all the booleans and nulls in a string seems overzealous. This is opinionated for a particular usage.

Parsed numbers in JSON object

redact-env WILL redact numbers in environment variable values, which will pose a problem if you parse them and dump them as numbers in a JSON object:

import * as redactEnv from 'redact-env'

process.env.PIN = '1234'

const secrets = redactEnv.build(['PIN'], process.env)

const pin: number = parseInt(process.env.PIN)

const unsafe = JSON.stringify({ pin })
console.log(unsafe)
// {"pin":1234} => valid JSON

const safeButIncorrect = redactEnv.redact(unsafe, secrets)

console.log(safeButIncorrect)
// {"pin":[secure]}  => not valid JSON

Windows paths in JSON objects

Because of backslash-delimited paths in Windows and string escaping occurring in JSON.stringify, Windows paths in environment variables won't be redacted if present in JSON strings.

In a future release, we might consider detecting the presence of backslashes in the environment variable value and having two regexp for this secret (one for the plain value and one backslashed-escaped).

License

MIT - Made with ❤️ by François Best

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