Airlock Quick Start on AWS
Airlock on AWS is a virtual machine-based product. It runs in EC2 on its own EC2 instance. A free trial period is available during which there is no charge for the Airlock software but there may be charges for the underlying AWS infrastructure.
Here’s a brief screen cast showing how to launch Airlock in AWS.
Launch Airlock in AWS
Go to Airlock in the AWS Marketplace. On this page you can see the Airlock overview, the pricing, and the supported EC2 instance types.
Select an instance type. We recommend
m5.large. The smaller instance types are intended only for testing and are not well-suited for production usage.Click the Continue to Subscribe button.
View and accept Airlock’s license agreement. Then click Accept Terms.
The subscription will now be created and you will be notified when it is ready! This usually only takes less than a minute.
Click the Continue to Configuration button to select the AMI, the version, and the region. We recommend using the newest version if multiple are available.
Click the Continue to Launch button to launch Airlock in your AWS account!
Congratulations! You have deployed Airlock in AWS. You are now ready to filter text!
Try it out!
With Airlock now running we can take it for a spin. We will send some text to Airlock and inspect at the response we get back. The Airlock virtual machine running in your cloud account should have a public IP address (unless you customized the deployment). We will use that public IP address to interact with Airlock.
Airlock, by default, will be configured with an HTTPS listener on port 8080 using a self-signed certificate. It is recommended that prior to use in a production environment the self-signed certificate is replaced by a valid certificate owned by your organization.
In the command below, replace <PUBLIC_IP> with the virtual machine’s public IP address or public host name.
With this command we are sending the text in the command to Airlock for filtering. Airlock will identify the patient name (George Washington) and the SSN (123-45-6789) and redact those values in the response. You can always use curl to send text to Airlock as in these examples but there are also SDKs you can use, too, to integrate Airlock with your applications.
Redacting Sensitive Information from Text
The types of sensitive information that Airlock identifies and removes is controlled by policies. By default, Airlock includes a filter profile that includes many of the types of sensitive information, such as names and social security numbers. We can send text to filter to Airlock for filtering using this default filter profile with the following command:
This command sends the contents of the file file.txt to Airlock. Airlock will apply the enabled filters and return a plain-text response consisting of the filtered text. (Replace localhost with the IP address or host name of Airlock if you are not running the command where Airlock is running.) You can also send text directly in the request instead of sending it as a file:
Next Steps
Now that you have Airlock running and know how to send text to it you are ready to integrate Airlock into your existing workflow and systems. Airlock’s API details how to send files to Airlock. Clients for some languages for Airlock’s API are available on GitHub.
Example Uses
Here's a few examples showing how to use Airlock with some common big-data and streaming applications.
Description | Technologies |
|---|---|
Remove sensitive information from text in an Apache NiFi dataflow | Apache NiFi |
Remove sensitive information from text using AWS Lambda in an Amazon Kinesis Firehose pipeline | Amazon Kinesis, AWS Lambda |
ChatGPT | |
Apache Kafka |