Sensitive Data Element Remediation

What problem this solves

Teams routinely commit configs, log formatters, and schema files that — usually by accident — start emitting sensitive elements (email addresses, phone numbers, session tokens, internal user IDs) into places where they shouldn’t appear. An SDE or DLP scanner typically catches these; historically, the remediation is a ticket that sits for weeks. This workflow turns the same finding into a PR within the hour.

Upstream detection is a prerequisite, not part of this workflow. The orchestrator expects a deterministic scanner to be producing structured findings it can consume — for example, Earlybird for in-repo SDE scanning, Gitleaks or TruffleHog for credentials, or a commercial DLP product for data-in-motion. The Automation page catalogs the common scanners; the agentic remediation here picks up after the scanner has fired.

High-level flow

    flowchart LR
    A[DLP scanner] -->|finding| B[Orchestrator]
    B -->|eligible?| C{Classifier}
    C -->|yes| D[Agent: redact/gate]
    C -->|no| E[Human triage queue]
    D --> F[Sandbox: apply patch]
    F --> G[Guardrail checks]
    G -->|pass| H[PR: sec-auto-remediation]
    G -->|fail| I[TRIAGE.md + stop]
    H --> J[Human reviewer]
    J -->|approve| K[Merge]
    J -->|reject| L[Feedback to prompt]
  

What ’eligible’ means

The classifier decides whether a finding is safe to hand to the agent. A finding is eligible when all of these hold:

• The file extension is on the allowlist (*.yaml, *.yml, *.json, *.tf, *.py log formatters, *.ts log formatters).
• The finding is a field name or value — not a free-text string in a comment or docstring.
• The repo has a passing test suite and a working CI pipeline.
• The repo has opted in by adding a .sec-auto-remediation.yml file at the root.

Anything else goes to the human triage queue.

What the agent does

The agent runs inside a sandboxed container with a strict tool allowlist (read files, write files, run tests, run a redaction linter). Its procedure:

    sequenceDiagram
    participant O as Orchestrator
    participant A as Agent
    participant S as Sandbox
    participant G as Guardrails

    O->>A: finding + repo snapshot
    A->>S: open file, locate field
    A->>A: choose remediation<br/>(redact / hash / drop)
    A->>S: apply edit
    A->>S: run tests
    S-->>A: test results
    A->>G: run DLP re-scan
    G-->>A: clean?
    alt clean
        A->>O: PR body + diff
    else still leaking
        A->>O: TRIAGE.md + stop
    end
  

Remediation menu

The agent picks from a small, reviewed set of patterns:

• Redact. Replace the field with a masked value in logs (user@example.com → u***@example.com).
• Drop. Remove the field from the payload entirely when the downstream consumer doesn’t need it.
• Hash. Replace with a salted hash when the downstream needs uniqueness but not the raw value.
• Gate. Put the field behind a feature flag so prod traffic stops emitting it immediately while a longer fix is designed.

The agent picks one and justifies the pick in the PR body. It does not invent new patterns.

Guardrails

• No schema changes. The agent will never alter a database schema, migration, or public API contract — those escape the blast radius and go to human triage.
• No bulk edits. One finding → one PR. Multiple findings in the same file produce multiple PRs, each reviewable in isolation.
• DLP re-scan required. Before opening the PR, the agent re-runs the DLP scanner against the sandbox and confirms the original finding is gone. If it isn’t, the agent stops.
• Human approval required. The PR is tagged with an auto-remediation label (the site uses sec-auto-remediation as the illustrative example — rename to your org’s convention). A reviewer from the security team and a reviewer from the owning team must approve before merge.

What it won’t catch

• Leaks that only manifest in production (e.g. only certain tenants hit the log path).
• Leaks inside binary artifacts or encoded blobs.
• Leaks that require a schema change to fix cleanly.
• Secrets rotation — the agent redacts the field; rotating the compromised secret is a separate, human-driven workflow.

How this workflow evolves

The orchestration stays stable — intake, dispatch, sandbox, guard, review. What changes:

• Prompt. Remediation-menu instructions are tuned on a regular cadence (e.g. quarterly) based on reviewer feedback.
• Model. The underlying model is upgraded when a newer one meaningfully improves precision on the team’s own evaluation set.
• Tools. When a new scanner joins intake, it’s added as another MCP connector; the orchestrator itself doesn’t change.

Changelog

• 2026-04-21 — v1, rolled out to opt-in repos. YAML, JSON, and Terraform formatters only.