Philter has many options to control how it operates. The options and how to configure them are described below.

Configuring Philter

Settings File

Philter’s settings file is application.properties. This file is located in Philter’s installation directory, which is most likely /opt/philter. All changes to this files requires Philter to be restarted for the changes to take affect. To restart Philter execute the following commands:

sudo systemctl restart philter.service
sudo systemctl restart philter-ner.service

Using Environment Variables

All of the following properties can also be set as environment variables by prepending PHILTER_ to the property name and changing periods to underscores. For example, the property filter.profiles.directory can be set using the environment variable PHILTER_FILTER_PROFILES_DIRECTORY by:

export PHILTER_FILTER_PROFILES_DIRECTORY=/profiles/

Setting or changing an environment variable requires Philter to be restarted. To restart Philter execute the following commands:

sudo systemctl restart philter.service
sudo systemctl restart philter-ner.service

Filter Profiles

Span Disambiguation

These values configure Philter's span disambiguation feature to determine the most appropriate type of sensitive information when duplicate spans are identified. In a deployment of multiple Philter instances, you must enable the cache service for span disambiguation to work as expected.

API Authentication

These values configure the authentication for Philter's API. For more information on Philter's API authentication see the API Authentication.

Metrics

These values configure how Philter reports metrics during its operations. For more information on the metrics collected and reported see Metrics. Philter can report metrics via JMX, Datadog, and Amazon CloudWatch. You may enable any combination of metrics services, or none of them to disable metrics reporting.

JMX Metric Reporting

Datadog Metric Reporting

Metrics will be published to Datadog every 60 seconds when enabled.

Amazon CloudWatch Metric Reporting

Metrics will be published to CloudWatch every 60 seconds when enabled. The value of metrics.hostname will be used as a dimension for the metrics.

AWS CloudWatch Credentials

Philter will look for AWS credentials following the default AWS credentials chain (environment variables, default credentials file, instance profile credentials). When running in AWS using an instance profile via an IAM role is the preferred method. When not possible, using environment variables is recommended and can be set as shown below:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="your-access-key"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="your-secret-key"

AWS IAM Role

The IAM user or role being used must have PutMetricData permissions. An example policy is shown below.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "cloudwatch:PutMetricData"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

API SSL

Philter's API can be configured to listen over SSL connections. When Philter is deployed via the AWS Marketplace, Windows Azure Marketplace or other third-party cloud marketplace, SSL will already be enabled via a self-signed certificate. It is recommended you replace this self-signed certificate with a valid certificate for your organization. When configured, the SSL listener will be available on the port defined by server.port. To enable Philter's SSL listener, provide the following properties:

An example configuration to enable SSL is shown below:

# SSL certificate settings
server.ssl.key-store-type=PKCS12
server.ssl.key-store=/opt/philter/ssl/philter.p12
server.ssl.key-store-password=Password123!
server.ssl.key-alias=philter
security.require-ssl=true

The command that generated the self-signed certificate referenced by the above configuration is:

keytool -genkeypair -keypass Password123! -dname "CN=philter, O=philter, C=US\ -alias philter -keyalg RSA -keysize 4096 -storepass Password123! -storetype PKCS12 -keystore /opt/philter/ssl/philter.p12 -validity 3650

Cache Service

The cache service is required to use consistent anonymization and filter profiles stored in Amazon S3. Philter supports Redis as the backend cache. When Redis is not used, an in-memory cache is used instead. The in-memory cache is not recommended because all contents will be stored in memory on the local Philter instance.

The following Redis settings are only required when using a self-signed SSL certificate.

Replacements Store

The locations of sensitive information in text replaced by Philter can optionally be persisted to an Elasticsearch index. The Elasticsearch index can provide a historical reference of how the text was processed. The following settings control if this functionality is enabled and the connection details of the Elasticsearch instance.

This store will not contain sensitive information. It will only contain locations (character start and character end positions) in the input text that Philter identified as sensitive information.