Document Redaction with LibreOffice

My talk from FOSDEM 2019.

Redaction in its sanitization sense (as distinguished from its other editing sense) is the blacking out or deletion of text in a document, or the result of such an effort. It is intended to allow the selective disclosure of information in a document while keeping other parts of the document secret. Typically the result is a document that is suitable for publication or for dissemination to others than the intended audience of the original document. For example, when a document is subpoenaed in a court case, information not specifically relevant to the case at hand is often redacted. Another example is patient information of hospitals, which is distributed to be used for research purposes.

A new document redaction feature for Collabora Office is being developed, and it will also be available on the next major version of LibreOffice. This new feature will provide a much more efficient means than the traditional print-redact-scan process, and will try to prevent also the accidental leakage of redacted information by completely removing them in the resulting PDF document, rather than just hiding.

Transcript

1. Collabora Productivity www.collaboraoffice.co Collabora Productivity Document Redaction with LibreOffice By Muhammet Kara Consultant Software Engineer at Collabora Productivity @muhamm3tkara
2. Collabora Productivity www.collaboraoffice.co Muhammet Kara Work • Working on the core & UI • Since Dec 2018 • Was @Pardus project before Community • LibreOffice certified developer • Long-time GNOME contributor • Member of The Document Foundation & the GNOME Foundation
3. Collabora Productivity www.collaboraoffice.co What is Redaction, aka Sanitization? “Redaction/Sanitization is the process of removing sensitive information from a document or other message, so that the document may be distributed to a broader audience.”
4. Collabora Productivity www.collaboraoffice.co Why? Some of the reasons • Unclassify the classified documents • Privacy protection & data anonymization • Prevent information leak in collaborative environments • ...
5. Collabora Productivity www.collaboraoffice.co Who? Some of the possible users • Government & military • Public institutions • Anyone who wants to share info without disclosing personal/private information • ...
6. Collabora Productivity www.collaboraoffice.co Process • Open a document in LibreOffice Writer/Calc • When you are ready to redact, click the redact button/menu • Redact the doc in LibreOffice Draw • Export & share with the others
7. Collabora Productivity www.collaboraoffice.co Technical Process • Convert the document into a metafile • Spawn a new Draw instance • Insert the metafile into Draw • Open the Redaction toolbar • Flatten/pixelize document while exporting
8. Collabora Productivity www.collaboraoffice.co Redaction Toolbar Rectangle Redaction Freeform Redaction Export as Pizelized PDF
9. Collabora Productivity www.collaboraoffice.co How & where & by who? • Adding new feature by improving LibreOffice’s facilities • On LibreOffice core code repo (master) • By Collabora Productivity team • Not ready for prime-time… yet! • More features are in being baked...
10. Demo
11. Collabora Productivity Thank you! By Muhammet Kara @muhamm3tkara muhammet.kara@collabora.com https://muhammetkara.com