pi-jev-redact

pi-jev-redact is a Pi coding harness extension that replaces sensitive text with <-REDACTED-> immediately before a provider request leaves your machine.

It protects text in the final serialized provider payload—including system prompts, conversation context, and tool results—while leaving Pi's local session history unchanged.

Disable or pause redaction

For a guaranteed package-level disable, run pi config, select the scope where pi-jev-redact is installed, and disable its extension resource. Then run /reload or start a new Pi process.

To keep the extension loaded but bypass redaction, create or edit the global ~/.pi/agent/pi-redact.json:

{
  "enabled": false
}

Then run /reload or start a new Pi process. A trusted project's .pi/pi-redact.json is applied after the global file and can set enabled back to true; use pi config when the disable must not be overridable by project configuration. For one diagnostic process with all auto-discovered extensions disabled, start Pi with pi --no-extensions (explicit -e paths still load).

Install

From npm:

pi install npm:pi-jev-redact

From GitHub:

pi install git:github.com/BubbatheVTOG/pi-jev-redact

Try it for one Pi process without installing:

pi -e npm:pi-jev-redact

What it detects

Detection breadth follows a 1–10 threshold (higher means more sensitive):

• 1–3: PEM private keys plus Anthropic/OpenAI-style keys;
• 4–6 (default 5): all established secret rules, adding GitHub, Slack, Google API, and JSON Web Tokens;
• 7–8: personal information, including email addresses, common US phone formats, US Social Security numbers, and payment-card-shaped values;
• 9–10: network identifiers (IPv4 and MAC addresses) plus aggressive bearer token, URL credential, and generic secret-assignment patterns.

You can add exact literals, environment-variable values, and bounded regular expressions. builtins and pii explicitly override the threshold-derived secret/PII groups.

Configuration

Create a global configuration at ~/.pi/agent/pi-redact.json, or a project configuration at .pi/pi-redact.json. These filenames are retained for compatibility with existing installations. Project configuration is read only for trusted projects. When both exist, project scalar options (enabled, threshold, builtins, pii, notify, and confirmIntent) override global values and custom rules are combined.

{
  "enabled": true,
  "threshold": 7,
  "builtins": true,
  "pii": true,
  "notify": true,
  "confirmIntent": true,
  "env": ["ANTHROPIC_API_KEY", "OPENAI_API_KEY"],
  "literals": ["private.example.test"],
  "patterns": [
    {
      "pattern": "SECRET-[A-Z0-9]{12}"
    }
  ]
}

Redaction configuration reference

Key	Default	Accepted values and behavior
enabled	true	Boolean master toggle. When false, requests pass through unchanged and no redaction log entry is produced.
threshold	5	Integer 1–10 selecting the built-in detection tiers described above.
builtins	derived	When absent, thresholds 1–3 use core provider/private-key rules and 4–10 use all established secret rules. true forces all established secret rules at any threshold; false disables core, platform, and aggressive secret rules. Custom rules remain active.
pii	derived	When absent, PII begins at threshold 7 and network identifiers at 9. true enables PII at any threshold (network identifiers still require threshold 9); false disables both PII and network rules.
notify	true	Show privacy-safe replacement and censor notifications in interactive sessions.
confirmIntent	true	Prompt once for each previously unseen sensitive fingerprint. Approval sends the redacted payload; denial censors the entire provider request. Headless sessions cannot prompt and send only the redacted payload.
env	[]	Environment-variable names matching ^[A-Z_][A-Z0-9_]*$. Resolved values become exact literal rules; unset or shorter-than-four values produce a fail-closed warning.
literals	[]	Exact strings of at least four characters. Do not commit actual credentials.
patterns	[]	Objects containing pattern and optional flags; each produces category configured-pattern.
patterns[].pattern	required	Regular-expression source, 1–512 characters, non-empty-match only, and rejected when unsafe/backtracking-prone. Backreferences, lookbehind, and common nested quantifiers are disallowed.
patterns[].flags	""	Any unique combination of i, m, s, u, and y. Global matching is added automatically; specifying g is rejected.

Default rationale

Threshold 5 catches established secret formats without broadly treating common emails, phone numbers, or IP addresses in source code as PII. Set threshold 7 (or pii: true) when PII protection should be active by default; use threshold 9 for network identifiers and aggressive generic-secret patterns. Intent confirmation defaults on, while request logging defaults off. Authentication headers remain intact only for provider transport and are forcibly removed from any payload logging copy.

Global configuration is applied first; a trusted project file applies second. The latest enabled, threshold, builtins, pii, notify, and confirmIntent values win. env, literals, and patterns are additive across both files. Untrusted project files are never read. Configuration files larger than 64 KiB are ignored with a fail-closed warning.

Prefer env rules for credentials. Do not commit literal secrets to a project configuration.

When redaction occurs, interactive Pi sessions receive a notification containing only the replacement count and broad rule categories. With confirmIntent (default true), each previously unseen sensitive span also prompts: approve to send the redacted payload, or deny to censor the whole provider request. Decisions are remembered by SHA-256 fingerprint, so the same span is not repeatedly asked about. A previously denied span is silently censored if it reappears. Concurrent intent checks are serialized so one new fingerprint produces one prompt. Headless sessions cannot prompt and proceed with the redacted payload.

The matched text is never written to disk. The decision cache stores only hashes, timestamps, decisions, and category names; the optional request log in the next section receives only the already-redacted payload.

Configuration changes take effect after /reload or a new Pi session.

Logging

By default pi-jev-redact writes no files. To inspect exactly what leaves your machine, enable a per-session request log in Pi's settings.json (global: ~/.pi/agent/settings.json; a project .pi/settings.json overrides key-by-key for trusted projects):

{
  "piRedact": {
    "log": "report",
    "logDir": "/tmp/pi-redact",
    "logMaxBytes": 16777216,
    "decisionDir": "/private/cache/pi-jev-redact"
  }
}

• log — "report" writes metadata only: timestamp, session, cwd, replacement count, rule categories, and payload size in bytes. "payload" additionally includes the full redacted provider payload. false or an absent key disables logging.
• logDir — directory for per-session JSONL files, one line per provider request, named <session-id>.jsonl. Default /tmp/pi-redact. Files are created with 0600 permissions and the directory with 0700.
• logMaxBytes — per-session file cap in bytes, default 16 MiB; 0 disables the cap. When the next entry would exceed the cap, a single marker line is written and logging stops for the rest of that session.
• decisionDir — location for decisions.json, containing only redaction-span fingerprints and approve/deny metadata. Defaults to $XDG_CACHE_HOME or ~/.cache/pi-jev-redact on Linux, ~/Library/Caches/pi-jev-redact on macOS, and %LOCALAPPDATA%/pi-jev-redact on Windows. Files use mode 0600; the directory uses 0700. Set this to a /tmp location for reboot-ephemeral decisions. The cache keeps at most 10,000 entries and evicts the oldest first. Writes use atomic replacement plus a cross-process lock/reload/merge cycle, so multiple Pi processes sharing one directory preserve one another's decisions.

With logging enabled, every provider request is recorded, including requests where nothing matched. payload-mode entries contain only the redacted payload. Credential-header values that must remain intact for transport are forcibly replaced in the logging copy, even if they do not match an enabled detection rule, so provider authentication is never persisted. Invalid piRedact values degrade to logging-disabled with a warning; provider requests are never blocked by a logging misconfiguration.

The default log directory is /tmp/pi-redact; the extension creates that subdirectory with mode 0700 and files with 0600, even though its /tmp parent is shared. Temporary storage is commonly cleared during reboot or system cleanup but is not a durability guarantee. Point logDir at a private, persistent location when logs must survive.

Security model and limits

pi-jev-redact is a last-mile text redactor, not a complete sandbox or secret manager.

• The original text remains in Pi's local session files and terminal transcript.
• Image contents, data URIs, and base64-like binary strings are intentionally not modified. No OCR is performed.
• Normal HTTP authentication headers are assembled after the provider payload hook and are not changed. For providers that embed a headers object inside the payload, credential-bearing fields (Authorization, Proxy-Authorization, x-api-key, api-key, and x-goog-api-key) are explicitly preserved while other header fields remain eligible for redaction.
• Detection is pattern-based. Unknown secret formats require a custom rule.
• Invalid or unreadable configuration, including a configured environment variable that is unset or too short, fails closed: provider requests are replaced with an empty payload and should fail before context is transmitted. Fix the warning and reload Pi.
• Pi runs before_provider_request handlers in extension load order. An extension loaded after pi-jev-redact can add new sensitive text after redaction. Load pi-jev-redact last when combining payload-rewriting extensions.
• Regular-expression validation reduces obvious denial-of-service patterns but is not a formal proof of linear runtime. Treat project configuration as trusted code.

Before relying on it for regulated or high-impact data, test representative provider payloads and use provider-side data controls as defense in depth.

Development

Requires Node.js 20 or newer.

npm install
npm run check
npm run test:integration:auth  # real Pi process + local mock provider
npm run pack:check

test:integration:auth creates temporary Pi state and a local OpenAI-compatible mock provider. It verifies that the configured transport credential arrives unchanged in Authorization, the credential never appears in the JSON body, and a separate key-shaped value placed in prompt content is replaced by <-REDACTED->. No real provider or credential is used.

Related packages

• pi-jev-anti-slop — structured Jev code and prose review (npm, GitHub).
• pi-jev-tool-guard — context-aware Jev safeguards for Pi tool calls (npm, GitHub).

License

MIT