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Sensitive information reference

Arcjet Sensitive Information Detection protects against clients sending you sensitive information such as PII that you do not wish to handle.

Configuration

Sensitive information detection is configured by allowing or denying a subset of sensitive information. The allow and deny lists are mutually-exclusive, such that using allow will result in a DENY decision for any detected sensitive information that is not specified in the allow list and using deny will result in an ALLOW decision for any detected sensitive information that is not specified in the deny list.

The arcjet client can be configured with one or more Sensitive information rules, which are constructed with the sensitiveInfo(options: SensitiveInfoOptionsAllow | SensitiveInfoOptionsDeny) function and configured by SensitiveInfoOptionsAllow or SensitiveInfoOptionsDeny:

type SensitiveInfoOptionsAllow = {
mode?: "LIVE" | "DRY_RUN";
allow?: Array<ArcjetSensitiveInfoType>;
contextWindowSize?: number;
// You can also provide a custom detection function to detect other types
// of sensitive information (see below).
detect?: (tokens: string[]) -> Array<SensitiveInfoType | undefined>;
};
type SensitiveInfoOptionsDeny = {
mode?: "LIVE" | "DRY_RUN";
deny?: Array<ArcjetSensitiveInfoType>;
contextWindowSize?: number;
// You can also provide a custom detection function to detect other types
// of sensitive information (see below).
detect?: (tokens: string[]) -> Array<SensitiveInfoType | undefined>;
};
type ArcjetSensitiveInfoType =
| "EMAIL"
| "PHONE_NUMBER"
| "IP_ADDRESS"
| "CREDIT_CARD_NUMBER";

Decision

Arcjet also provides a single protect function that is used to execute your protection rules.

This function returns a Promise that resolves to an ArcjetDecision object. This contains the following properties:

  • id (string) - The unique ID for the request. This can be used to look up the request in the Arcjet dashboard. It is prefixed with req_ for decisions involving the Arcjet cloud API. For decisions taken locally, the prefix is lreq_.
  • conclusion (ArcjetConclusion) - The final conclusion based on evaluating each of the configured rules. If you wish to accept Arcjet’s recommended action based on the configured rules then you can use this property.
  • reason (ArcjetReason) - An object containing more detailed information about the conclusion.
  • results (ArcjetRuleResult[]) - An array of ArcjetRuleResult objects containing the results of each rule that was executed.
  • ip (ArcjetIpDetails) - An object containing Arcjet’s analysis of the client IP address. See the SDK reference for more information.

You check if a deny conclusion has been returned by a sensitive info rule by using decision.isDenied() and decision.reason.isSensitiveInfo() respectively.

You can iterate through the results and check whether a sensitive info rule was applied:

for (const result of decision.results) {
console.log("Rule Result", result);
}

This example will log the full result as well as the sensitive info rule:

Custom entity detection

When configuring Arcjet Sensitive Info you can provide a custom detect function, this enables you to detect entities that we don’t support out of the box using custom logic.

The function will take a list of tokens and must return a list of either undefined, if the corresponding token in the input list is not sensitive, or the name of the entity if it does match. The number of tokens that are provided to the function is controlled by the contextWindowSize option, which defaults to 1. If you need additional context to perform detections then you can increase this value.

Error handling

Arcjet is designed to fail open so that a service issue or misconfiguration does not block all requests. The SDK will also time out and fail open after 500ms when NODE_ENV is production and 1000ms otherwise. However, in most cases, the response time will be less than 20-30ms.

If there is an error condition, Arcjet will return an ERROR type and you can check the reason property for more information, like accessing decision.reason.message.

Testing

Arcjet runs the same in any environment, including locally and in CI. You can use the mode set to DRY_RUN to log the results of rule execution without blocking any requests.

We have an example test framework you can use to automatically test your rules. Arcjet can also be triggered based using a sample of your traffic.

See the Testing section of the docs for details.