Settings

Phileas has settings to control how it operates. The settings and how to configure each are described below.

The configuration for the types of sensitive information that Phileas identifies are defined in filter policies outside of Phileas' configuration properties described on this page.

Configuring Phileas

The Phileas Settings File

Phileas looks for its settings in an application.properties file.

Property Sources and Precedence

Each setting can be supplied as an environment variable, a JVM system property, or an entry in the settings file. They are resolved in that order of precedence: an environment variable overrides a JVM system property of the same name, which overrides a value in the settings file, which overrides the built-in default.

Environment variables and system properties use the property name exactly as written, including the periods — there is no PHILTER_ prefix and no change of case or separators. For example, the property span.window.size is read from an environment variable named span.window.size (or a system property of the same name).

Note: most shells do not permit periods in a variable name used with export, so providing these as environment variables generally requires a process launcher, container, or orchestrator that can define a variable whose name contains periods. Supplying the value as a JVM system property (for example, -Dspan.window.size=5) or in the settings file is often more convenient.

Span Disambiguation

These values configure Phileas' span disambiguation feature to determine the most appropriate type of sensitive information when duplicate spans are identified. In a deployment of multiple Phileas instances, span disambiguation should use a shared, persistent vector store so the information learned by one instance is available to the others.

Setting	Description	Allowed Values	Default Value
span.disambiguation.enabled	Whether or not to enable span disambiguation.	true, false	false
span.disambiguation.hash.algorithm	The hashing algorithm used to map context tokens into the vector. Any value other than murmur3 falls back to Java's hashCode.	murmur3, hashCode	murmur3
span.disambiguation.vector.size	The size of the context vector used to represent the tokens surrounding a span. Must match across instances sharing learned vectors.	An integer value.	512
span.disambiguation.ignore.stopwords	Whether common stop words are excluded from the context vector.	true, false	true
span.disambiguation.stopwords	The comma-separated list of stop words to exclude when span.disambiguation.ignore.stopwords is enabled.	A comma-separated list of words.	(a built-in English stop word list)

Advanced Settings

In most cases, the settings below do not need changed. Contact us for more information on any of these settings.

Setting	Description	Allowed Values	Default Value
regex.timeout.ms	The maximum time in milliseconds a single regular-expression match attempt may run before it is aborted as a suspected catastrophic-backtracking (ReDoS) pattern. Applies to user-supplied identifier and section patterns. A value of 0 or less disables the guard.	An integer value.	1000
span.window.size	The number of tokens of context captured on each side of an identified span. Used for context-based features such as span disambiguation.	An integer value.	5
incremental.redactions.enabled	Whether to record an incremental redaction (the document state and its hash after each applied redaction) for each filtered document.	true, false	false