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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 Info is configured by specifying which mode you want it to run in.

The configuration definition is:

type SensitiveInfoOptions = {
mode?: "LIVE" | "DRY_RUN";
allow?: Array<SensitiveInfoType>; // Cannot be specified if `deny` is present
deny?: Array<SensitiveInfoType>;// Cannot be specified if `allow` is present
contextWindowSize?: number;
detect?: (tokens: string[]) -> Array<SensitiveInfoType | undefined>;
};

The arcjet client is configured with one or more sensitiveInfo rules which take one or many SensitiveInfoOptions.

The SensitiveInfoType enum allows the following values:

  • EMAIL
  • CREDIT_CARD
  • IP_ADDRESS
  • PHONE_NUMBER

You can also provide a custom detection function to detect other types of sensitive information (see below).

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.