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Security Best Practices

To ensure the highest level of protection for your sensitive data and your account, we recommend following these security best practices. Implementing these measures helps safeguard your information from unauthorized access and ensures compliance with data protection standards.

Use Strong and Unique Passwords

Your account's first line of defense is a strong password. We enforce specific password requirements to ensure complexity and resistance to brute-force attacks.

  • Complexity: Your password must be at least 12 characters long and contain at least:
    • One uppercase letter
    • One lowercase letter
    • One numeric digit
    • One special character (e.g., !, @, #, $)
  • Uniqueness: Do not reuse passwords from other services. Using a unique password for Philterd Data Services ensures that a compromise on another platform does not put your redaction data at risk.

Enable API IP Address Restrictions

If you are using our API to integrate redaction into your workflows, you should restrict access to your API keys by only allowing specific IP addresses or CIDR ranges.

  • How it Works: By default, API requests are accepted from any IP address. Enabling restrictions ensures that even if an API key is leaked, it can only be used from your authorized networks.
  • Configuration: You can manage these restrictions in the Account Settings view. Provide one IP address or CIDR range per line (e.g., 123.123.123.123/32 or 10.0.0.0/24).
  • Best Practice: Only whitelist the specific public IP addresses of your application servers or corporate VPN.

Minimize Data Retention

Reducing the amount of time that sensitive data resides in any system is a core principle of data security. Philterd Data Services allows you to customize the retention period for both redacted documents and audit ledgers.

  • Lower Document Retention: Set your Redacted Document Retention to the minimum necessary for your workflow (e.g., 1 day). This ensures that the protected versions of your files are purged from our system as soon as possible after processing.
  • Lower Ledger Retention: While ledgers are useful for auditing, you should lower the Redaction Ledger Retention to the minimum value required for your compliance needs.
  • Configuration: Retention values can be adjusted in the Account Settings.

Do Not Share Accounts

Each user should have their own unique credentials for Philterd Data Services.

  • Security Risk: Sharing accounts compromises the integrity of audit logs, as it becomes impossible to determine which individual performed a specific action.
  • Access Control: If multiple team members need access to the platform, they should each be invited to create their own accounts or managed through your organization's identity provider if applicable.
  • Credential Protection: Never share your password or API keys with colleagues or third parties.

Summary of Recommendations

Practice Recommendation
Passwords 12+ characters, mixed case, numbers, and symbols.
API Security Enable IP Whitelisting for all API keys.
Retention Set Document and Ledger retention to the minimum possible values.
Account Management One account per individual; no credential sharing.