Anonymising data

Added by Jeff Turner, last edited by David Yu on Jul 14, 2008  (view change)
JIRA Documentation

Index
A Confluence data anonymiser is also available.
As for JIRA 3.7+, data sent via Administration -> Support Request is anonymised by default, and it is thus the easiest route to sending us anonymised data (but be sure your mail server has a username/password specified, so relaying is allowed).

Support requests are resolved much faster if people attach their data export, however with some companies this is not an option, because the data contains sensitive commercial information.

In JIRA 3.7+, JIRA automatically anonymises data sent to Atlassian from the Administration -> Support Request page. For earlier versions, or people who want to anonymise JIRA data from the command-line, we've created a data 'anonymiser', which replaces most text in JIRA XML backups with x's.

The anonymiser can be downloaded from here.

Unzip the package, then open a console and in the jira_anon directory run:

java -jar joost.jar <backup.xml> anon.stx > anon-backup.xml

where <anon-backup.xml> is your JIRA XML backup.

Then zip the generated backup XML file, and attach it to a support case on https://support.atlassian.com

The anonymiser currently replaces the following text with x's:

  • Issue summary, environment, and description
  • Comments, work logs, change logs
  • Project descriptions
  • Descriptions for most elements (notification schemes, permission schemes, resolutions)
  • Attachment file names.
  • "Unlimited text" custom fields

Check anon-backup.xml to ensure it's clean enough for your needs before you send to us.

Problems?

Invalid XML Characters

If, when you run the anonymiser, you get an error indicating that there are invalid XML characters in the XML backup of your database, run our utility to remove invalid XML characters first before anonymising.

Java Version

You will need Java 1.4 or above to run this. You can check your Java version by running java -version, eg:

$ java -version
java version "1.5.0_07"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_07-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_07-b03, mixed mode, sharing)

If you find yourself using JDK 1.3 or earlier, check your path (echo %PATH% on Windows, echo $PATH on Unix) and ensure that the right version of Java is at the beginning. See the docs for more info on setting up Java.

The screenshot below is a simple example of how it is run in the command prompt of Windows XP:

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Comments (3)

 

  1. Nov 14, 2006

    Jeff Turner says:

    The anonymizer has been rewritten to use STX

    The anonymizer has been rewritten to use STX, a memory-efficient subset of XSLT. It should no longer run out of memory on large exports. In addition, "unlimited text" custom field values are now anonymized too.

  2. May 10, 2007

    Grzegorz Ostrogorski says:

    Hi everyone, If you get message below, during anonimizing : Parser has reached ...

    Hi everyone,

    If you get message below, during anonimizing :

    Parser has reached the entity expansion limit "64,000" set by the Application.

    then, you can try to do it with additional option : java -jar -DentityExpansionLimit=100000 joost.jar <backup.xml> anon.stx > anon-backup.xml
     
    You can also increase DentityExpansionLimit if it would be to small.
     
    Cheers,
    Gregory 

  3. Aug 19

    Darren Martz says:

    To support Worklog comments, make the following change to the STX file....

    To support Worklog comments, make the following change to the STX file.

    BEFORE

    <stx:template match="Action/body/text() | */description/text() | Issue/environment/text() | Issue/summary/text() | NotificationInstance/email/text() | ChangeItem/newstring/text() | ChangeItem/oldstring/text() | FileAttachment/filename/text() | NotificationScheme/*/text() | PermissionScheme/*/text() | Resolution/*/text() | CustomFieldValue/textvalue/text() | OSPropertyText/value/text()">
        <stx:value-of select="translate(., '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx')"/>
    </stx:template>

    AFTER

    <stx:template match="Worklog/body/text() | Action/body/text() | */description/text() | Issue/environment/text() | Issue/summary/text() | NotificationInstance/email/text() | ChangeItem/newstring/text() | ChangeItem/oldstring/text() | FileAttachment/filename/text() | NotificationScheme/*/text() | PermissionScheme/*/text() | Resolution/*/text() | CustomFieldValue/textvalue/text() | OSPropertyText/value/text()">
        <stx:value-of select="translate(., '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx')"/>
    </stx:template>