v0.6.0 - The one we scrambled to ship 🍳

[peterp]

Hot on the heels of v0.5.0 we're ready to launch v0.6.0. This is the nature of incrementalism.

In this release we upgraded Copycat, which includes the ability to scramble content. So: copycat.scramble("cats are 2x better than dogs") becomes 'ewgj qsc 0s zajmng tgqq nojd'. This is super helpful if you're testing designs. You can keep the "shape of strings," but protect what the user entered.

Read the scramble string reference docs

We've also added the ability to salt your Copycat. Doing so reduces the very rare ability that someone could figure out an input string from an output string. @justinvdm explains it beautifully in our docs:

Lets say we replaced all the first names in some table of data. Included in this data was the name 'Susan', which was replaced with 'Therese':
copycat.firstName('Susan') // -> 'Therese'

While the attacker is able to see the name Therese, it is difficult for them to look at Copycat's code, and figure out 'Susan' from 'Therese'. But the attacker knows they're dealing with first names, and they have access to the Copycat library. What they can do, is input a list of first names into Copycat, until they find a matching name.

Let's say they input the name 'John'. The result is 'April', which does not match 'Therese', so they move on. They next try 'Sarah', which maps to 'Florencio' - again no match, they move on. They next try Susan, which maps to the name they see - Therese. This means they have a match, and now know that the original name was Susan:

copycat.firstName('John') // -> 'April', no match
copycat.firstName('Sarah') // -> 'Florencio', no match
copycat.firstName('Susan') // -> 'Therese', match!

To mitigate this, Copycat supports salt with setSalt - additional data concatenated onto the input value before hashing.

Bugfixes

• Fixing the CLI link to submit a new issue
• Fixed the CLI progress bar during restorations
• Fixed null pointers in sub-setting

[peterp]

@justinvdm We should probably also add something here about seeding?

[peterp]

I found your awesome docs, thanks Justin!