NoteShield

Find sensitive data hiding in your Obsidian vault — national identifiers, bank accounts, payment cards, API keys and passwords — entirely offline.

Notes accumulate things you never meant to keep: a client's ID number pasted from an email, an account number copied off an invoice, an API key dropped into a scratch note "just for a second" three months ago. Then the vault gets synced, shared, backed up to a cloud drive, or published as a digital garden.

NoteShield scans for that, locally.

What makes it different from grep

Every rule that can be verified arithmetically is verified before it is reported:

So an order number is not reported as a PESEL, and an invoice id is not reported as a NIP. When two rules match the same characters, the longer, containing match wins — a bank account stays a bank account instead of being announced as a payment card because sixteen of its digits happen to satisfy Luhn.

Pattern-only rules (no arithmetic exists for them): private key blocks, AWS / Google / Stripe / GitHub / Slack / AI-provider keys, JWTs, and credentials written next to their own name (password: …, api_key = …).

Privacy

• No network calls. Nothing is uploaded, no model is queried, no update is fetched.
• No telemetry.
• Reports are redacted. Findings and the exported report only ever carry 44•••••••59, never the original value. That is what makes a report safe to attach to a ticket or commit next to the vault.

Usage

Commands (Ctrl/Cmd+P):

• NoteShield: Scan vault
• NoteShield: Scan current note
• NoteShield: Save last report to vault

Results open in the right sidebar; click any finding to jump to that line.

Silencing a finding

PESEL 44051401359 <!-- noteshield-ignore -->

<!-- noteshield-ignore pl-pesel -->
44051401359 in a documentation example

<!-- noteshield-ignore-file -->

or in frontmatter:

---
noteshield: ignore
---

Settings

Rule packs can be toggled individually (Polish personal identifiers, financial data, credentials, contact details), along with redaction mode, ignored paths (Templates, Archive/**), a file size limit, and an optional quiet check of the note you just saved.

Install

From the community plugin list (recommended): Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search NoteShield → Install → Enable.

Manual install, if you prefer it or want a specific version:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from a release.
2. Put them in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/noteshield/.
3. Enable NoteShield in Settings → Community plugins.

Development

npm install
npm test      # 49 tests, no Obsidian needed — detection logic is pure
npm run build # type-check + bundle to main.js

The detection engine (src/rules.ts, src/scanner.ts, src/report.ts) imports nothing from Obsidian, which is why it can be tested directly with node --test.

Limits, stated honestly

NoteShield reduces the chance that sensitive data sits unnoticed in your notes. It is not a compliance certification, it cannot prove a vault is clean, and it will miss data written in a form no rule describes. Treat a clean report as "nothing matched the enabled rules", nothing more.

MIT licensed.