Masquerade MCP: Redact. Replace. Retain Control | Hacker Times
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Masquerade MCP: Redact. Replace. Retain Control.
🤐 Problem: Tools like Claude or GPT are incredibly powerful, but they require raw input. If you're dealing with contracts, medical records, or internal documents, that's risky.
🛡️ Solution: Masquerade acts as a privacy firewall for your files. Just paste in the file path to a PDF, and Masquerade will:
Automatically detect sensitive data (names, emails, dates, entities)
Redact the sensitive data
Let you preview before sending to an LLM
Architecture
User Input: The user asks Claude to redact a PDF by providing its file path.
PDF Processing: MCP reads the PDF and converts it to text.
Sensitive Data Detection: The text is sent to Tinfoil (an isolated AI platform using Llama 3.3 70B) to identify sensitive data.
Redaction: MCP removes the sensitive data and creates a redacted PDF.
Summary Return: MCP sends Claude a summary with:
Masked versions of the sensitive data
Redaction counts per page
The path to the redacted file
Quering PDF with Claude: The user can upload the redacted PDF to Claude if satisfied with the redactions.
Automate the Claude config setup (and skip the next steps)
python -m masquerade.configure_claude
Get Python path: which python
Get MCP file path: python -c "import masquerade as m; print(f'{m.__path__[0]}/mcp_pdf_redaction.py')"
Add (1) Python path, (2) MCP file path, and (3) Tinfoil API key to the JSON below and add that to claude_desktop_config.json. Instructions to find the config file are in the image below.
Restart Claude
{"mcpServers":{"pdf-redaction":{"command":"/path/to/python",// Run `which python`"args":["/path/to/mcp_pdf_redaction.py"],// Run `python -c "import masquerade as m; print(f'{m.__path__[0]}/mcp_pdf_redaction.py')"`"env":{"TINFOIL_API_KEY":"your_api_key"// Create Tinfoil account and paste API key}}}}
How to use?
Prompt Claude: "Redact sensitive information from this PDF: /path/to/filename.pdf"
MCP opens the redacted and highlighted PDF files
Manually upload the redacted PDF to Claude for quering
Note: Don't upload the original PDF to Claude, only the file path.
Contributing
If you have a fix or improvement, feel free to submit a pull request. For significant changes, please open an issue first to discuss your proposed updates.