#!/usr/bin/perl =head1 NAME pseudonymizr.pl - Unambiguous substitution of marked strings by randomized ones =head1 USE CASE Societies that consider to use treasuredb for their finances are strongly advised to test it in advance. The board members may do that themselves, but they might want to delegate that to competent regular members. However, in the latter case, privacy laws are to be observed that can prohibit disclosure of real data for this purpose. To conduct tests with real data without infringement of privacy laws, this script has been developped. It replaces all names and other sensible information that is specially marked, by a random string. It is guaranteed that repeatedly occurring strings are replaced by the same pseudonym, of course. =head1 HOW IT WORKS This script pseudonymizes lines from standard input and writes them to standard output. All strings that need to be replaced must be wrapped into a special marker, namely X{...}, where X can be any upper- or lowercase letter of the alphabet, denoting a certain category of information, e.g. "M" for member names. Caution with natural member names! Slightly differing content of M{...} clauses lead to completely different pseudonyms. In order not to render the tests irreversible and in disaccord with actual states, because the association of members and accounts is wrong, you should prefer using it for the unique and standard member ID, say the number in the member table. Where proper names in financial transfer information, use a different letter. =head1 COMMAND pseudonymizr.pl [-r] secret_registry.txt < in_file.csv > out_file.csv =head1 FLAGS =over 4 =item -r reverse mode, i.e. de-pseudonymize =back =cut use strict; use utf8; my $LENGTH = 5; my @CHARS = ( 'A' .. 'Z', 'a' .. 'z', 0 .. 9 ); my (%subst, %known, $registry_fh); my $reverse_mode = $ARGV[0] eq q{-r} && shift; my $registry_file = shift; open $registry_fh, '<:utf8', $registry_file or die "Cannot read $registry_file: $!" if -e $registry_file; if ( $registry_fh ) { my ($h1, $h2) = $reverse_mode ? (\%subst => \%known) : (\%known => \%subst); while ( $_ = <$registry_fh> ) { chomp; my ($random, $orig) = split /\t/; $h1->{ $random } = $orig; } %$h2 = reverse %$h1; } binmode STDIN, ':utf8'; binmode STDOUT, ':utf8'; while ( $_ = ) { s/ (?<=\w\{) (.+?) (?=\}) / pseudonymize($1) /gexms; print; } unless ( $reverse_mode ) { # Rewrite the registry we could have expanded with new names (sorted) open $registry_fh, '|-', qq{sort > $registry_file} or die "Cannot pipe to sort: $!"; while ( my ($random, $orig) = each %known ) { printf $registry_fh "%s\t%s\n", $random, $orig; } } sub pseudonymize { my $orig = shift; $subst{ $orig } //= do {{ # Make random string with $LENGTH characters from @CHARS my $random = join q{}, map { $CHARS[ rand @CHARS ] } 1 .. $LENGTH; # If known, try anew (p = 1 : @CHARS ^ $LENGTH, i.e. p > 0) $_ = defined($_) ? redo : $orig for $known{ $random }; # return to %subst cache $random; }}; }