Note
The main branch is currently for Philter 4.0.0 development. For 3.x, refer to the tags. The latest of which is 3.4.0.
Philter is an API-based application to identify and manipulate (redact, anonymize, and more) PII, PHI, and other sensitive information.
Philter is built upon the open source PII and PHI redaction engine Phileas. Philter provides an API on top of Phileas that allows for redaction and management of filtering policies.
Philter was released as open source under the Apache License, version 2.0, in July 2024 for version 2.6.0, but Philter dates back to 2019. See the Release Notes for a description of past versions.
For Philter's User Guide please see https://philterd.github.io/philter/.
Philter is available on the cloud marketplaces as a turnkey redaction solution. These cloud images are pre-configured and ready to be used immediately after launch.
- Philter on the AWS Marketplace
- Philter on the Google Cloud Marketplace
- Philter on the Azure Marketplace
Philter is built with Maven (requiring >= Java 17):
mvn clean install
To run Philter:
Philter encrypts sensitive data at rest and requires a base64-encoded 32-byte
(AES-256) key supplied via the PHILTER_ENCRYPTION_KEY environment variable.
Generate one and export it before starting the containers:
export PHILTER_ENCRYPTION_KEY=$(openssl rand -base64 32)
docker compose build
docker compose up
Keep this key safe and use the same value across restarts and instances. Philter will refuse to start if it is missing or not a valid 32-byte key.
Once the containers are running, you can submit text to Philter's API for redaction (using the default API key default):
curl -k "https://localhost:8080/api/filter" --data "George Washington lives in 90210 and his SSN was 123-45-6789." -H "Content-type: text/plain" -H "Authorization: Bearer default"
You can also access the UI at https://localhost:8080. The default credentials are admin / admin.
Interactive API documentation (Swagger UI) is available at https://localhost:8080/swagger-ui/index.html.
Philter uses a built-in in-memory cache by default and can be configured to use a shared Valkey/Redis cache for distributed deployments. See Caching in the user documentation.
As of Philter 2.6.0, Philter is licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0. Previous versions were under a proprietary license.
Copyright 2024-2026 Philterd, LLC. Copyright 2018-2023 Mountain Fog, Inc.