index.md

rfc	start_date	decision_date	pr	status
15	2018-08-23	2018-09-25	#30	approved

Full item redaction

Summary

This RFC proposes removing the old partially defined item redaction solution in favour of RFC0010: Item hash.

Motivation

The specification defines “redaction” as:

An item may be removed from a register, but the entry MUST NOT be removed from the register.

In some buried decision log and as a known thing for some components of the Registers core team, a while ago it was decided that to fully redact an item, the HTTP response would be a 410 Gone. The specification doesn't reflect this decision nor the details.

After some effort trying to define how this solution works for items and records I have came to the conclusion that it is a broken solution. The fundamental problem lays on the fact that a record is an entry with the item embedded. In JSON it is possible to show that the item is redacted (or some of them if the entry has many items). In CSV it's not possible without changing the column structure which would cause problems to any user consuming records expecting a particular column structure.

Worth mentioning that 410 Gone can't be applied to a record because it is an entry and these never get removed or redacted.

Explanation

A fully redacted blob MUST be done by redacting every value according to RFC0010.

Both item and record resource MUST return a 200 OK response serialised with the requested content type if available.

---

EXAMPLE:

For example, a redacted blob in JSON:

GET /items/sha-256:6b18693874513ba13da54d61aafa7cad0c8f5573f3431d6f1c04b07ddb27d6bb HTTP/1.1
Host: country.register.gov.uk
Accept: application/json

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "country": "**REDACTED**fff7021c7df4426be0f9a3c83f236eb6f85d159e624b010d65e6dde267889c21",
  "official-name": "**REDACTED**bf1860175c77869938cf9f4b37edb00f2f387be7b361f9c2c4a2ac202c1ba2e5",
  "name": "**REDACTED**94099b1e0b9a1e673bafee513080197fa1980895ca27e091fdd4c54fab2bed24",
  "citizen-names": "**REDACTED**e6ec7637c8df22f85b49d91ac98a37c96372cf3328e1b5aa96e00af1658f0dc0"
}

And in CSV:

GET /items/sha-256:6b18693874513ba13da54d61aafa7cad0c8f5573f3431d6f1c04b07ddb27d6bb HTTP/1.1
Host: country.register.gov.uk
Accept: text/csv;charset=UTF-8

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/csv;charset=UTF-8

country, official-name, name, citizen-names
**REDACTED**fff7021c7df4426be0f9a3c83f236eb6f85d159e624b010d65e6dde267889c21, **REDACTED**bf1860175c77869938cf9f4b37edb00f2f387be7b361f9c2c4a2ac202c1ba2e5, **REDACTED**94099b1e0b9a1e673bafee513080197fa1980895ca27e091fdd4c54fab2bed24, **REDACTED**e6ec7637c8df22f85b49d91ac98a37c96372cf3328e1b5aa96e00af1658f0dc0

Similarly, a record would be redacted like:

GET /records/GB HTTP/1.1
Host: country.register.gov.uk
Accept: application/json

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "GB": {
    "index-entry-number": 6,
    "entry-number": 6,
    "entry-timestamp": "2016-04-05T13:23:05Z",
    "key":"GB",
    "item":[
      {
        "country": "**REDACTED**fff7021c7df4426be0f9a3c83f236eb6f85d159e624b010d65e6dde267889c21",
        "official-name": "**REDACTED**bf1860175c77869938cf9f4b37edb00f2f387be7b361f9c2c4a2ac202c1ba2e5",
        "name": "**REDACTED**94099b1e0b9a1e673bafee513080197fa1980895ca27e091fdd4c54fab2bed24",
        "citizen-names": "**REDACTED**e6ec7637c8df22f85b49d91ac98a37c96372cf3328e1b5aa96e00af1658f0dc0"
      }
    ]
  }
}