If you search "free config sanitizer alternatives," you'll land on two very different kinds of tools: general scripting utilities that can be bent into shape (bash, VSCode, CyberChef), and a growing wave of browser extensions built specifically to redact text before you paste it into an AI chat. Almost none of the second group know what a BGP neighbor password or an SNMP community string looks like. Here's an honest comparison of both.
The scripting route: bash, VSCode, CyberChef
What these actually give you
- bash one-liners (
sed/grep) — fast if you already know the exact pattern to strip, but you're writing new regex for every vendor and every credential format, and one missed pattern means a live password ships in the paste. - VSCode manual regex — same idea with a GUI and find/replace history, useful for a one-off, tedious for a recurring workflow, still no vendor awareness.
- CyberChef — runs entirely client-side in your browser, which is the right privacy model, and its "Find / Replace" and "Extract" recipes can be chained into something workable. But you're building the recipe yourself, from scratch, per vendor.
These are legitimate options if you only ever touch one vendor's syntax and you're comfortable maintaining your own regex library. They stop scaling the moment you're pasting configs from three different firewall brands in the same week.
The browser-extension route: generic AI-privacy tools
A separate category exists for a different problem: stripping personal data (emails, names, card numbers) before pasting into ChatGPT or Claude. Several free and open-source options do this well for that use case — worth knowing about even though they solve a different problem than a network config:
What generic PII/secret redactors cover, and don't
- Cover well: emails, generic API key formats (
sk-...,ghp_...), credit card numbers, phone numbers — the kind of PII that shows up in any text, not just network configs. - Don't cover: vendor-specific config syntax. None of them recognize a Cisco
enable secretline, a FortiGateset psksecret, or a MikroTik RouterOS export well enough to catch every credential format inside it — because that's not what they were built for. - Don't cover: the difference between a strong hash and a reversible one. A Cisco type 7 password is trivially reversible; a bcrypt hash isn't. Generic redactors mask both the same way, if they catch the pattern at all — they have no concept of credential strength.
If your only goal is "don't paste my email into ChatGPT," a generic redactor is a fine, often free choice. If your goal is "don't paste my BGP neighbor password or my SNMP community string into ChatGPT," it isn't built for that, and testing several against real router/firewall exports turns up the same gap every time: they process the text, but the config-specific secrets pass straight through untouched.
Where a network-specific tool changes the outcome
There's also a smaller, older category built specifically for network configs — command-line tools like Netconan, aimed at ISPs and MSPs who need to hand a sanitized config to a client or a vendor. These are solid for that original use case: batch-processing files before they leave a support queue. What they weren't built for is the moment you actually want to paste a config into an AI assistant and ask it a question — there's no in-browser workflow, no BYOK chat, no click-to-copy.
A Cisco enable secret 5 $1$... line, a FortiGate set psksecret ENC ... block, a MikroTik RouterOS export with an embedded WPA passphrase, an OSPF message-digest-key, a TACACS+ server key — these follow vendor-specific syntax that a generic PII scanner has no reason to know, and a general-purpose CLI anonymizer has no reason to expose in a paste-and-ask workflow.
Comparison table
| Tool | Vendor-aware config parsing | Runs where | AI chat built in | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| bash / sed / grep | No (you write it) | Terminal | No | Free |
| VSCode manual regex | No (you write it) | Editor | No | Free |
| CyberChef | No (you build the recipe) | Browser, client-side | No | Free |
| Netconan-style CLI anonymizers | Partial (multi-vendor, no protocol-level auth key parsing) | Terminal / CI pipeline | No | Free, open source |
| Generic AI-privacy browser extensions | No | Browser | Varies, usually one AI platform | Mostly free |
| ScrubForge | Yes, 12 vendor profiles + protocol-level secrets (BGP, OSPF, HSRP, TACACS+, RADIUS, SNMP) | Browser extension | Yes, BYOK with 5 providers | Free tier, paid Pro |
Which one to actually use
- One-off, single vendor, you know the exact pattern: a bash one-liner or a CyberChef recipe is genuinely faster to write once than to install anything.
- Recurring, multiple vendors, need to hand a file to someone else: a CLI anonymizer is the right shape for a pipeline, even if it means no AI-chat step.
- Recurring, want to paste into ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and ask a question without re-checking every line by hand: none of the above were built for that specific workflow — it's the gap ScrubForge fills, with vendor-aware detection plus an integrated BYOK chat that only ever sees the tokenized version of your config.
Frequently asked questions
Is CyberChef safe to use for sanitizing network configs?
Yes, from a privacy standpoint — it runs entirely in your browser with no server calls. The limitation isn't privacy, it's coverage: CyberChef won't know which parts of a router or firewall config are sensitive unless you build that logic into the recipe yourself, vendor by vendor.
Do generic ChatGPT privacy extensions catch router and firewall passwords?
Not reliably. They're built to catch generic PII and common API key formats, not vendor-specific syntax like a Cisco enable secret, a FortiGate PSK, or an SNMP community string. Test one against a real config export and check the output line by line before trusting it with production credentials.
What's the real difference between a CLI anonymizer and ScrubForge?
CLI tools like Netconan are built for batch-processing config files before handing them to a third party, MSP-to-client or ISP-to-vendor. ScrubForge is built for the paste-and-ask-AI workflow: a browser extension with a context menu, vendor detection, and an optional BYOK chat that only ever sees tokens, not your real credentials.
Is there a completely free way to sanitize a config before pasting it into an AI tool?
Yes. ScrubForge's free tier covers the core detection engine, 12 vendor profiles and format-aware tokens, with no account required. The paid tier adds the integrated AI chat, deep entropy scanning, and batch processing.