Eymoutiers, France, April 18, 2025
PostgreSQL Anonymizer 2.1 is out and it brings new possibilities in the field
of database privacy protection!
PostgreSQL Anonymizer is an extension that hides or replaces personally
identifiable information (PII) or commercially sensitive data from a PostgreSQL
database.
The extension offers five different masking strategies:
Each strategy is complemented by an enhanced suite of Masking Functions, including advanced techniques such as: Substitution, Randomization, Faking, Pseudonymization, Partial Scrambling, Shuffling, Noise Addition and Generalization.
The extension can installed with Debian and RPM packages, an Ansible role, a docker image, etc. It is also available on major DBaaS providers including : Alibaba Cloud, Crunchy Bridge, Google Cloud SQL, Microsoft Azure Database, Neon, Tembo
See the INSTALL section of the documentation for more details !
Sensitive information doesn't just hide in obvious places.
While columns like name and zipcode are typical targets for masking, BYTEA columns often contain overlooked personal data in profile photos, shipping vouchers, barcodes, QR codes, delivery notes, etc.
Of course the most efficient way to clean this kind of personal data is to simply delete it with
SECURITY LABEL FOR anon ON COLUMN user.photo
IS 'MASKED WITH VALUE NULL';
But our new Image Blurring capability preserves visual data for testing while protecting privacy:
SECURITY LABEL FOR anon ON COLUMN user.photo
IS 'MASKED WITH FUNCTION anon.image_blur(photo,5.0)';
This feature works seamlessly across all our masking strategies : apply it on-the-fly with Dynamic Masking and Anonymous Dumps, or permanently with Static Masking.
For more details, check out the documentation:
https://postgresql-anonymizer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/masking_functions/#image-bluring
The image blurring feature was developped by Pierre-Marie Petit. Kudos to him for this tremendous innovation!
This release also includes code, bugfixes, documentation, code reviews and ideas from Anthony Dumontois, Matthias van de Meent, and other contributors.
And also special thanks to the PGRX team for their amazing work!
PostgreSQL Anonymizer is part of the [Dalibo Labs] initiative. It is mainly developed by [Damien Clochard].
This is an open project, contributions are welcome. We need your feedback and ideas! Let us know what you think of this tool, how it fits your needs and what features are missing.
If you want to help, you can find a list of Junior Jobs here:
https://gitlab.com/dalibo/postgresql_anonymizer/issues?label_name%5B%5D=Junior+Jobs