Obfuscating IP Addresses and Host Names in Red Hat Insights

You can obfuscate IP addresses and host names in the data that is sent to Red Hat through the Red Hat Insights collection agent. Obfuscation is changing information in a (sometimes consistent) way to obscure the original content, in this case IP addresses and host names.

Note that obfuscating IP addresses and host names will cause difficulty in identifying systems in the Insights UI. For instance, host0 will be displayed for all systems if host names are obfuscated. When registering systems to Red Hat Insights be sure to use the --display-name option to set a UI name to avoid this issue.

Obfuscating IP addresses

To obfuscate IP addresses before uploading, change obfuscate to True and remove the comment mark (#) in the insights-client.conf configuration file.

• IPv4 addresses are obfuscated consistently throughout all files. For example, if 192.168.100.5 is obfuscated to 10.0.0.68 in one place in the uploaded content, it is displayed as 10.0.0.68 in all files in that content, so that troubleshooting can still take place.
• Only IPv4 addresses can be obfuscated. IPv6 addresses cannot be obfuscated.

Obfuscating host names

To obfuscate host names before uploading, change obfuscate_hostname to True and remove the comment mark (#) in the insights-client.conf configuration file.

Related Resources

Red Hat Insights security information
System information collected by Red Hat Insights
YAML-style black list configuration for Red Hat Insights client
Red Hat Insights Client Obfuscation Changes to Output in Insights Core v3.0.183