Scrubbing Sensitive Data

As with any third-party service it's important to understand what data is being sent to Sentry, and where relevant ensure sensitive data either never reaches the Sentry servers, or at the very least it doesn’t get stored.

These are some great examples for data scrubbing that every company should think about:

• PII (Personally Identifiable Information) such as a user's name or email address, which post-GDPR should be on every company's mind.
• Authentication credentials, like your AWS password or key.
• Confidential IP (Intellectual Property), such as your favorite color, or your upcoming plans for world domination.

We offer the following options depending on your legal and operational needs:

• filtering or scrubbing sensitive data within the SDK, so that data is not sent to Sentry. Different SDKs have different capabilities, and configuration changes require a redeployment of your application.
• configuring server-side scrubbing to ensure Sentry does not store data. Configuration changes are done in the Sentry UI and apply immediately for new events.
• running a local Relay on your own server between the SDK and Sentry, so that data is not sent to Sentry while configuration can still be applied without deploying.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

Our newer SDKs do not purposefully send PII to stay on the safe side. This behavior is controlled by an option called send-default-pii.

Turning this option on is required for certain features in Sentry to work, but also means you will need to be even more careful about what data is being sent to Sentry (using the options below).

If you do not wish to use the default PII behavior, you can also choose to identify users in a more controlled manner, using our user identity context.

Scrubbing Data

event_scrubber

You can use the event_scrubber configuration parameter to simplify removing sensitive data from your event payload.

If send_default_pii is set to False, the default scrubber implementation will run automatically and filter anything in the denylist from potentially sensitive interfaces in the event payload.

import sentry_sdk
from sentry_sdk.scrubber import EventScrubber

sentry_sdk.init(
    # ...
    send_default_pii=False,
    event_scrubber=EventScrubber(),  # this is set by default
)

You can also pass in a custom denylist to the EventScrubber class and filter additional fields that you want.

from sentry_sdk.scrubber import EventScrubber, DEFAULT_DENYLIST

# custom denylist
denylist = DEFAULT_DENYLIST + ["my_sensitive_var"]

sentry_sdk.init(
    # ...
    send_default_pii=False,
    event_scrubber=EventScrubber(denylist=denylist),
)

The scrubber will check parts of the event that are most likely to contain data from the denylist, like user and request data. However, by default, it will not search these recursively for performance reasons. If you want the scrubber to be recursive, initialize it with recursive=True.

from sentry_sdk.scrubber import EventScrubber

sentry_sdk.init(
    # ...
    send_default_pii=False,
    event_scrubber=EventScrubber(recursive=True),
)

before_send & before_send_transaction

SDKs provide a before_send hook, which is invoked before an error or message event is sent and can be used to modify event data to remove sensitive information. Some SDKs also provide a before_send_transaction hook which does the same thing for transactions. We recommend using before_send and before_send_transaction in the SDKs to scrub any data before it is sent, to ensure that sensitive data never leaves the local environment.

In Python a function can be used to modify the event or return a completely new one. If you return None, the event will be discarded.

import sentry_sdk

def strip_sensitive_data(event, hint):
    # modify event here
    return event

sentry_sdk.init(
    # ...

    before_send=strip_sensitive_data,
)

Sensitive data may appear in the following areas:

• Stack-locals → Some SDKs (Python, PHP and Node) will pick up variable values within the stack trace. These can be scrubbed, or this behavior can be disabled altogether if necessary.
• Breadcrumbs → Some SDKs (JavaScript and the Java logging integrations, for example) will pick up previously executed log statements. Do not log PII if using this feature and including log statements as breadcrumbs in the event. Some backend SDKs will also record database queries, which may need to be scrubbed.
• User context → Automated behavior is controlled via send_default_pii.
• HTTP context → Query strings may be picked up in some frameworks as part of the HTTP request context.
• Transaction Names → In certain situations, transaction names might contain sensitive data. For example, a browser's pageload transaction might have a raw URL like /users/1234/details as its name (where 1234 is a user id, which may be considered PII). In most cases, our SDKs can parameterize URLs and routes successfully, that is, turn /users/1234/details into /users/:userid/details. However, depending on the framework, your routing configuration, race conditions, and a few other factors, the SDKs might not be able to completely parameterize all of your URLs.

For more details and data filtering instructions, see Filtering Events.

Examples

Contextual information

Instead of sending confidential information in plaintext, consider hashing it:

Sentry.setTag('birthday', checksumOrHash('08/12/1990'));

This will allow you to correlate it within internal systems if needed, but keep it confidential from Sentry.

User details

Your organization may determine that emails are not considered confidential, but if they are, consider instead sending your internal identifier:

Sentry.setUser({id: user.id});

// or

Sentry.setUser({username: user.username});

Doing this will ensure you still benefit from user-impact related features.

Logging integrations

As a best practice you should always avoid logging confidential information. If you have legacy systems you need to work around, consider the following:

• Anonymize the confidential information within the log statements (for example, swap out email addresses -> for internal identifiers)
• Use before_breadcrumb to filter it out from breadcrumbs before it is attached
• Disable logging breadcrumb integration (for example, as described here)