There are many ways that protocol buffers might be stringified into logs,
accidentally or on purpose, printed in stack traces, etc. The built-in
behavior stringifies the entire protobuf recursively, including all field
data.
At Square, we deal with payments, and often have data of varying
sensitivity in protobuf fields, which we'd like to be elided from
stringified output.
We use an internal fork of protoc to handle a custom field option,
"redacted", and have also patched the stringification code to print
"[REDACTED]" for those fields. We do the same in Go, and in the C
implementation (for Ruby).
Last year, we chatted with the protobuf team, and they were sympathetic to
our use case (in fact, they mentioned that the part of Google that deals
with payments has something similar internally: I think that's where the
"sensitive" name came from). I'd like to get that discussion rolling again.
We'd like to see one of the following happen (in decreasing order of
awesomeness for us):
- upstreaming of the "redacted" field option, and modification of the
runtimes to elide redacted fields when stringifying
- introduction of generic interception points to selectively override
default stringification behavior in Java, Go, and Ruby (at least).
- addition of a "SerializeToString" or equivalent method, and removal of
default full-stringification behavior of the toString (Java), String (Go),
etc. - that way you only serialize on purpose
- many tests rely on string comparison, even though nobody is
supposed to rely on it being stable - perhaps the default behavior could
compute a hash?
Josh Humpries (who now works at Fullstory) created a proposal
<https://github.com/google/protobuf/issues/1160> a while back, but it
didn't go anywhere. I reached out to the protobuf team, and Damien Neil
suggested that this group was the appropriate place to propose such changes.
Bikeshed away!
Zellyn
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