Settings

Philter 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 Philter identifies are defined in filter policies outside of Philter' configuration properties described on this page.

Configuring Philter

The Philter Settings File

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

Using Environment Variables

Properties set via environment variables take precedence over properties set in Philter' settings file.

All following properties can also be set as environment variables by prepending PHILTER_ to the property name and changing periods to underscores. For example, the property filter.profiles.directory can be set using the environment variable PHILTER_FILTER_PROFILES_DIRECTORY by:

export PHILTER_FILTER_PROFILES_DIRECTORY=/profiles/

Using environment variables to configure Philter instead of using Philter' settings file can allow for easier configuration management when deploying Philter.

Policies

Setting	Description	Allowed Values	Default Value
filter.policies.directory	The directory in which to look for policies.	Any valid directory path.	./policies/

Span Disambiguation

These values configure Philter' span disambiguation feature to determine the most appropriate type of sensitive information when duplicate spans are identified. In a deployment of multiple Philter instances, you must enable the cache service for span disambiguation to work as expected.

	Description	Allowed Values	Default Value
span.disambiguation.enabled	Whether or not to enable span disambiguation.	true, false	false

Cache Service

The cache service is required to use consistent anonymization and policies stored in Amazon S3. Philter supports Redis as the backend cache. When Redis is not used, an in-memory cache is used instead. The in-memory cache is not recommended because all contents will be stored in memory on the local Philter instance.

The cache will contain sensitive information. It is important that you take the necessary precautions to secure the cache itself and all communication between Philter and the cache.

Setting	Description	Allowed Values	Default Value
cache.redis.enabled	Whether or not to use Redis as the cache.	true, false	false
cache.redis.host	The hostname or IP address of the Redis cache.	Any valid Redis endpoint.	None
cache.redis.port	The Redis cache port.	Any valid port.	6379
cache.redis.auth.token	The Redis auth token.	Any valid token.	None
cache.redis.ssl	Whether or not to use SSL for communication with the Redis cache.	true, false	false

The following Redis settings are only required when using a self-signed SSL certificate.

Setting	Description	Allowed Values	Default Value
cache.redis.truststore	The path to the trust store.	Any valid file path.	None
cache.redis.truststore.password	The trust store password.	Any valid file path.	None
cache.redis.keystore	The path to the keystore.	Any valid file path.	None
cache.redis.keystore.password	The keystore password.	Any valid file path.	None

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
ner.timeout.sec	Controls the timeout in seconds when performing name entity recognition. Longer text may require longer processing times.	An integer value	600
ner.max.idle.connections	The maximum number of idle connections to maintain for the named entity recognition. More connections may improve performance in some cases.	An integer value.	30
ner.keep.alive.duration.ms	The amount of time in milliseconds to keep named entity recognition connections alive. Longer text may require longer processing times.	An integer value.	60