Kodex (Community Edition - CE) is an open-source toolkit for privacy and security engineering. It helps you to automate data security and data protection measures in your data engineering workflows. It offers the following functionality:

• Read data items from a variety of sources such as files, databases or message queues.
• Protect these data items using various privacy- & security enhancing transformations, like de-identification, masking, pseudonymization, anonymization or encryption.
• Send the protected items to a variety of destinations.

With Kodex, you can describe your data protection and data security workflows using a simple, declarative configuration language: Just like DevOps tools let you describe infrastructure as code, Kodex is a PrivacyOps & SecurityOps tool that let you describe privacy and security measures as code.

Kodex takes care of the boring and difficult aspects of privacy, such as

• Key management: Kodex manages encryption and pseudonymization keys for you (if you want that).
• Parameter management: Kodex keeps track of how every single data item was processed so you can prove the compliance of your data workflows and create an audit trail.
• Data transformation: Kodex implements modern cryptographic and statistical techniques to protect your data.

To download and install Kodex from source, simply run

git clone https://github.com/kiprotect/kodex
cd kiprotect

make
make install

You can find the official documentation at https://heykodex.com/docs.

Kodex reads its configuration from so-called blueprints. To get an idea of how this works, check out our blueprints repository, which contains example blueprints together with instructions on how to run them. You can install these blueprints via Kodex (requires Internet access):

kodex blueprints download

Alternatively, you can copy them to your machine manually, please refer to the documentation for more details. To then run the pseudonymization example, simply type

# pseudonymize the example data and write it to a file named 'pseudonymized.json'
kodex run pseudonymization/examples/data-types/pseudonymize

# depseudonymize the data again and print the result on stdout
kodex run pseudonymization/examples/data-types/depseudonymize

That's it! Kodex takes care of generating and storing cryptographic parameters for the pseudonymization. If you want to manually enter a key instead to generate parameters, you can do that too:

# pseudonymize the data with a user-supplied key
kodex run pseudonymization/examples/data-types/pseudonymize-with-key

# depseudonymize with a key as well
kodex run pseudonymization/examples/data-types/depseudonymize-with-key

Kodex comes with a suite of automated unit tests, which you can run with Make:

make test

The plugin test may fail with an error message "plugin was built with a different version of package internal/cpu" which can occur if the compile flags used for compiling the main code and the plugin differ. This might happen e.g. if you perform race condition detection tests. To fix the problem, go to the plugin folder and run

make clean
make

Kodex also comes with a number of benchmarks that you can run as follows:

make bench

This is still an early version of Kodex and does not contain many features yet. We will progressively port more functionality from our Enterprise Edition (EE). The following features are next up on our list:

• Anonymization: Anonymize streaming data using differentially private aggregations.
• Discovery: Discover sensitive and personal information in your structured and unstructured data.
• Encryption: Encrypt and decrypt structured data.
• Data Mapping: Analyze and map your data infrastructure.
• Consent Management: Manage and enforce processing purposes and user consent for all your data streams.

Our open-source work is made possible by commercially offering a Kodex enterprise edition (EE), which extends the community edition (CE) with functionality that supports a deployment of Kodex in a professional enterprise environment. It includes e.g. the following functionality:

• Advanced, SQL-based configuration & parameter management and storage.
• REST-based API to control all Kodex functionality.
• Web interface to manage and monitor data streams.
• More advanced data transformations.
• Role-based access control mechanism.

Are you interested to learn more about Kodex EE? Just visit our website or get in touch with us!

Kodex is currently licensed under the Affero GPL license, version 3 (AGPL-3.0). See the license file for details. In addition, we also offer a commercial license that allow you to directly integrate the Kodex code into closed-source software without disclosing your own code. If you're interested in buying a commercial license, please get in touch with us.

The Affero GPL license is a strong copyleft license that allows you to freely use Kodex for commercial and non-commercial purposes. If you use the software as a standalone tool without integrating it with your own software code (i.e. you do not import and compile it as a Go library in your own Go code) its use will not affect your own software code in any way. In that respect, Kodex can be used as freely as other Linux tools provided under a GPL license.

However, if you integrate the Kodex code with your own software code and distribute or offer that software as a web service, you will have to make the source code of your software available under a compatible license. Similarly, if you modify or extend Kodex and either distribute it or offer it as a service you will have to make the source code of your changes available as well. This ensures that improvements which you make to Kodex will benefit the entire user community.

If you have trouble using Kodex-CE due to the license terms, please get in touch with us. We offer a commercial license that enables you to integrate Kodex with your own software code without being affected by the terms of the AGPL license.

Do you have trouble getting Kodex to run? Do you want to suggest a new feature or report a bug? Please open an issue in this issue tracker. If it's something that you'd like to discuss directly with us, please send us an e-mail, we love to hear from you!

Are you using Kodex in your organization and like it? Please let the world know! Spreading the word about it and giving us feedback helps us to improve the software.