Redact Model Data with the Redactable Models Package for Laravel

Redactable Models for Laravel is a package by Ashley Allen that allows you to redact, obfuscate, or mask data in your Laravel models:

When building web applications, you'll often need to keep hold of old data for auditing or reporting purposes. But for data privacy and security reasons, you may want to redact the sensitive information from the data that you store. This way, you can keep the rows in the database, but without the sensitive information.

This package works by implementing the Redactable interface and implementing these methods. While you are free to implement them however you want, the package does provide some conventions to simplify redacting data. Here's what the skeleton model and interface methods look like:

use AshAllenDesign\RedactableModels\Interfaces\Redactable;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
 
class User extends Model implements Redactable
{
    public function redactable(): Builder
    {
        // define the criteria for which records are "redactable"
    }
 
    public function redactionStrategy(): RedactionStrategy
    {
        // Define the strategy and fields to redact
    }
}

The redactionStrategy() is used to define how to go about redacting model data and which fields that are redacted. When reviewing this package, I liked the MaskContents strategy as you can still get hints at which record you're looking at, should you need to cross-reference the real data, or give a small hint about the data without divulging it:

public function redactionStrategy(): RedactionStrategy
{
    return app(MaskContents::class)
        ->mask(field: 'name', character: '*', index: 0, length: 4)
        ->mask(field: 'email', character: '-', index: 2, length: 3);
}

#Main Features

• Easily define criteria around when to redact model data
• Ability to mass-redact data in models
• Pre-packages redaction strategies (Replace contents, Hash Contents, Mask Contents)
• Manually redact a model programmatically
• Ability to mass-redact production data for test environments

💻 You can get started with this package on GitHub: ash-jc-allen/redactable-models