Stax Digital Garden

YMN-1008 - Cryptographic Field Redaction in Digital Gardens

3 min read

Living Document Notice
Published 2026-09-17. The evolving architecture, revisions, and connected notes for this dispatch live in the Stax Digital Garden.

Cryptographic Field Redaction in Digital Gardens

Cryptographic Field Redaction in Digital Gardens: Dual-trace Phosphor P31 emerald green and P4 paper white vector CRT macro showing armored public key fingerprints, Ed25519 vector envelopes, and cryptographic recipient paths

Summary

Publishing an interconnected knowledge garden should not inadvertently leak private phone numbers, home addresses, or confidential meeting minutes. Yeoman implements cryptographic field redaction and cut-line stripping for safe public syndication.

The Tension Between Open Gardens and Personal Privacy

Digital gardens thrive on rich, interconnected backlinks and shared intellectual research. However, a knowledge graph that documents real-world collaborations inevitably contains Personally Identifiable Information (PII), including private email addresses, direct telephone lines, and unannounced project codenames.

Yeoman resolves this conflict through a strict dual-pipeline syndication architecture:

  1. Sovereign Local Vault: Contains complete, unredacted contact dossiers, full channel addresses, and private interaction notes.
  2. Public Quartz Digital Garden: Receives deterministically scrubbed copies where sensitive frontmatter keys and body sections are redacted or stripped.
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|               Dual-Pipeline Redaction Pipeline              |
|                                                             |
|   [Local Vault Dossier] (Full PII + Private Notes)          |
|              │                                              |
|              v                                              |
|   [Yeoman Redaction Engine]                                 |
|              │                                              |
|     +--------+--------+                                     |
|     │                 │                                     |
|     v                 v                                     |
| [Quartz Garden]   [Directus CMS]                            |
| (PII Stripped,    (Web Markdown,                            |
|  Wikilinks Kept)   Cut-line Removed)                        |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

The Cut-Line Invariant in Action

Yeoman dispatches enforce the universal Cut-Line Boundary. Any metadata or private reference positioned below the cut-line delimiter (---) is stripped before the note is posted to public API endpoints:

# Public Article Content
Public exposition of technical systems...
 
---
* **Directus Target**: yeoman
* **Garden Source Reference**: MOC - Fleet Operations
* **Garden Source Reference**: YMN-1008 - Cryptographic Field Redaction

When the syndication script runs, the Directus payload contains only clean web Markdown, while the local vault and Quartz mirror retain the garden backlinks.

Automated PII Field Masking

During the static site build, Yeoman applies a schema-driven masking filter across the frontmatter channels list:

def redact_contact_frontmatter(metadata):
    if 'channels' in metadata:
        for channel in metadata['channels']:
            if channel.get('kind') in ['phone', 'home_address']:
                channel['value'] = '[REDACTED FOR PUBLIC GARDEN]'
            elif channel.get('kind') == 'email' and not channel.get('public', False):
                # Mask user portion: a***@domain.org
                parts = channel['value'].split('@')
                channel['value'] = f"{parts[0][0]}***@{parts[1]}"
    return metadata

Zero-Knowledge Hash Verification

To verify note integrity without revealing private content, Yeoman calculates a salted HMAC hash of the raw dossier. Readers can verify that a published public note corresponds to a verified internal record without exposing the underlying private fields.

  • Directus Target: yeoman
  • Garden Source Reference: MOC - Bosun PKM Tools, MOC - Fleet Operations
  • Garden Source Reference: [YMN-1008 - Cryptographic Field Redaction in Digital Gardens](YMN-1008 - Cryptographic Field Redaction in Digital Gardens)

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