Redacting sensitive information in software artifacts
Mark Grechanik, Collin McMillan, Tathagata Dasgupta, Denys Poshyvanyk, Malcom Gethers · 2014
In the past decade, there have been many well-publicized cases of source code leaking from different well-known companies. These leaks pose a serious problem when the source code contains sensitive information encoded in its identifier names and comments. Unfortunately, redacting the sensitive information requires obfuscating the identifiers, which will quickly interfere with program comprehension. Program comprehension is key for programmers in understanding the source code, so sensitive information is often left unredacted.