pipefog

pipefog – Stream‑structured data obfuscator for JSON/YAML.

🔒 Mask your sensitive data while preserving format and structure. Designed for CLI pipelines and integration with tools like jq and yq.

🚀 Example Usage

cat secrets.json | jq . | pipefog | jq .

✨ Features

• 🔐 Deterministic obfuscation – ID fields, usernames, and keys are hashed in a consistent format.
• 🏷️ Shape-preserving – Keeps field order, numeric values, and categories untouched.
• 📏 Length-preserving – Output matches input length by default, at the cost of reduced entropy.
• 🧩 Supports JSON and YAML – Auto-detects format or allow override with --format.
• 🛠️ Composable CLI – Works seamlessly in pipelines with jq, yq, and other Unix tools.
• 🗓️ ISO 8601 datetime obfuscation – Shifts dates relative to runtime baselines while preserving format.

pipefog detects datetimes in the YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ form. A random baseline between 1970-01-01 and the current date is chosen at startup. The first encountered datetime sets an original baseline. Every subsequent datetime is shifted relative to these baselines so the output remains a valid ISO 8601 Z datetime while preserving relative differences.

Performance

Benchmark input: tests/perf_sample.json (200 iterations).

Last updated: 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC

🏗️ Architecture

This project documents its system architecture using Mermaid diagrams, which GitHub renders natively.

graph TD
    A["Input stream (JSON/YAML)"] --> B["pipefog CLI"]
    B --> C["Mode"]
    C -->|default| D1["Parse tokens"]
    D1 --> H0["sha256 hash"]
    D1 --> D2{String type?}
    H0 --> D2
    D2 -->|alpha_word| H1["hash→syllables"]
    D2 -->|uppercase_word| H2["hash→syllables→upper"]
    D2 -->|capitalized_word| H3["hash→syllables→capitalized"]
    D2 -->|snake_case_word| H4["hash→snake_case"]
    D2 -->|iso8601_z_datetime| H5["obfuscate_iso8601_z_datetime"]
    D2 -->|base32_lowercase| H6["hash→base32_lower"]
    D2 -->|base32_uppercase| H7["hash→base32_upper"]
    D2 -->|no match| H8["hex encode hash"]
    H1 --> E["Output stream"]
    H2 --> E
    H3 --> E
    H4 --> E
    H5 --> E
    H6 --> E
    H7 --> E
    H8 --> E
    C -->|humanise| F["Convert bytes to syllables"]
    C -->|syllable-frequency| G["Report syllable stats"]

Planned features:

• ✅ Streaming-safe – Process large files through stdin/stdout with minimal memory usage.