no-pii-in-logs

Keywords: no-pii-in-logs, PII, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, console.log, logger, email, SSN, credit card, phone number, CWE-359, ESLint rule CWE: CWE-359: Exposure of Private Personal Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Prevent personally identifiable information (PII) — emails, SSNs, credit cards, phone numbers — from reaching console.* or logger output. Logs are routinely shipped to third-party platforms (Datadog, Sentry, CloudWatch) and indexed by people who never had access authorization for that data.

This rule is part of eslint-plugin-secure-coding.

Quick Summary

Why this matters

Application logs are the highest-volume, lowest-trust egress channel in most production services. By default they are:

• Shipped to vendors (Datadog, Sentry, Splunk, Loki, ELK) — broadening the trust boundary.
• Retained for weeks to months — long enough that a breach years from now still discloses today's data.
• Read by anyone with engineering oncall — not the access-controlled subset that touches the user record itself.

GDPR Article 32 (security of processing) and HIPAA §164.312 (technical safeguards) both treat log-leaked PII as a reportable incident. Most breach disclosures in 2024–2025 traced the data exposure to a logger, not a database.

What the rule detects

The rule flags PII patterns whether they enter the log call as a literal, a templated string, or a member access on an user/person/account identifier:

Examples

❌ Incorrect

console.log('user signed in', user.email, user.phone);
logger.info(`payment from ${customer.creditCard}`);
console.error('lookup failed for SSN', record.ssn);

// PII concealed in JSON.stringify still gets logged
logger.debug(JSON.stringify(user));

✅ Correct

import { redactPii, hashStable } from '@/lib/pii';

console.log('user signed in', { userId: user.id });
logger.info('payment authorised', { customerId: hashStable(customer.id) });
console.error('lookup failed', { ssnHash: hashStable(record.ssn) });

// Or use a structured logger that redacts known PII fields by allowlist
logger.debug({ user: redactPii(user) });

Error Message Format

🔒 SECURE-CODING CWE-359 | PII detected in log argument | HIGH
   Fix: Replace the PII payload with a stable opaque id (UUID, hash) or pass through a redacting logger before emission.

Known False Negatives

• Custom logger wrappers (logEvent, audit, track) are detected via the loggers rule option allowlist; loggers not on the allowlist are skipped.
• PII reached via aliasing (const e = user.email; log(e);) is tracked one assignment hop; deeper chains require type-aware enabling.
• PII embedded inside an HTTP request body that incidentally surfaces in an error message (e.g. JSON.stringify(req.body) in a catch block) is not always reached without type info.