What is the best practice to pseudonymize user data?

Elastic Security
1

What is the recommended approach to deal with logs to be as GDPR compliant as possible?
I need to pseudonymize user data. The only resource I found is dated back to march of 2018 in this blog post: https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/gdpr-personal-data-pseudonymization-part-1

Is this still best practice? Can I use the fingerprint method within a beat instead of logstash, because I'm not using logstash right now and try to keep my stack as slim as possible.

Really looking forward to your answer and thanks a lot,
Nils

1 Like
2

Hi @elk51211, I was curious and looked briefly into this but this isn't my area of expertise. It looks like there might have been some work in beats for a processor for this:

Outside of that I think there are discussions about accomplishing it on a technical level within ingest nodes but I don't think that is possible at the moment from some reading towards the bottom here:

As for if this is the recommended approach to use a beats processor or logstash, that I cannot say for sure, someone else here might know more though.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your opinion!

4

I looked up the fingerprint beat solution. Unfortunately it does not offer an UUID Method. I need unique pseudo ids. Any idea?

5

I would open a github issue within the file beats repo as a feature request if it's missing something you need and they might be able to help you out:

1 Like
6

@elk51211 Imho this is a good question. Also I've been waiting for a long time for part 2.. :slight_smile:

2 Likes