AnonymizerRails

Sometimes it is necessary to scramble user_data in a clean and fast way. AnonymizerRails provides the functionality to do this. AnonymizerRails is a small gem for Rails 4.2 and higher, to anonymize attributes of an ActiveRecord model. It doesn't matter if the attribute is a serialized_hash or an ActiveRecord:Store. You can anonymize any attribute/value, no matter how deep it is nested. The attribute's value(s) are replaced with a string of 6 x's:

"xxxxxx"

Anonymization for associated models' attributes will be implemented in a future version of this gem.

Supported Rails versions

• 4.2 and higher

Usage

The AnonymizerRails gem adds two methods to your ActiveRecord models:

• data_to_anonymize
• anonymize_data

The first one, data_to_anonymize, is a class method. It is used to configure which attributes should be anonymized. In your model it is called like this:

class Foo < ApplicationRecord
  data_to_anonymize :name
end

If you want to anonymize more than one attribute, you have to wrap the attributes in an array e.g. like this:

class Foo < ApplicationRecord
  serialize :address
  data_to_anonymize [:bic, :iban, { address: [:city, :zip] }]
end

The above code tells the gem that when anonymize_data is called on any instance of Foo, it should anonymize the attributes bic, iban, address[:city] and address[:zip].

anonymize_data is an instance method added to every ActiveRecord instance. When called on a record, it anonymizes the configured attributes:

 @foo = Foo.create(name: "Tim", surname: "Test", bic: "BKR532836FR", iban: "DE12345678", address: { zip: "12345", city: "Berlin" })
 @foo.anonymize_data
 @foo.save

 @foo
 #<Foo id: 1, bic: "xxxxxx", iban: "xxxxxx", name: "Tim", surname: "Test", address: {:zip=>"xxxxxx", :city=>"xxxxxx"}, created_at: "2018-08-28 14:20:42", updated_at: "2018-08-28 14:20:42">

!!!Attention!!!: The anonymize_data method doesn't save anonymized records to the database.

You have to call save on every instance you just anonymized on your own.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile if you want to use it with Rails 5.2 or higher:

gem 'anonymizer_rails'

If you want to use it with a lower version of Rails 5 or 4 (Rails 4 only supported from 4.2 onwards), just add this to your Gemfile:

gem "anonymizer_rails", git: "https://github.com/ikuseiGmbH/anonymizer_rails", branch: "rails-4"

Then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself with:

$ gem install anonymizer_rails

Contributing

TBC

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.