Australian Marking - SENSITIVE

Detects the Australian Government SENSITIVE tier in both email and document forms: Commonwealth OFFICIAL: Sensitive (including its IMM/caveat variants such as Personal-Privacy, Legal-Privilege, Legislative-Secrecy) and the Queensland (QGISCF) standalone SENSITIVE marking. Regex logic ported from Microsoft's canonical PSPF SIT guidance; matched case-sensitively.

Type

regex

Engine

boost_regex

Confidence

high

Confidence justification

High confidence on the OFFICIAL: Sensitive stem (case-sensitive, structured + banner). Standalone SENSITIVE (QLD) is lower confidence (75) and requires government context to control false positives.

Detection quality

Mixed

Jurisdictions

au

Regulations

Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth)

Frameworks

PSPF, QGISCF

Data categories

government, security-classification

Scope

narrow

Risk rating

8

Platform compatibility

Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Compatible, Macie: Compatible, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Compatible, Netskope: Unsupported

Pattern

\bOFFICIAL(?:[ ]|:[ ]?|[ ]?//[ ]?)Sensitive\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

Queensland, QGISCF, Australian Government, PSPF

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

• Document footer candidate SENSITIVE — Low-tier probe - uppercase candidate without a formal marking field
• Classification: OFFICIAL: Sensitive — Medium-tier probe - formal classification field without a complete header
• Subject [SEC=OFFICIAL:Sensitive] — Operational email subject marking reaches the balanced tier
• Queensland Government QGISCF briefing SENSITIVE — Medium-tier probe - standalone Queensland banner with explicit government marking context
• X-Protective-Marking: VER=2024.1, NS=gov.au, SEC=OFFICIAL:Sensitive — High-tier probe - complete Australian protective-marking header

Should not match

• this is a sensitive topic for discussion — lowercase English word (case-sensitive exclusion)
• Memo [SEC=OFFICIAL] — plain OFFICIAL belongs to au-marking-official
• Briefing [SEC=PROTECTED] — PROTECTED belongs to au-marking-protected
• THIS DOCUMENT IS COMMERCIALLY SENSITIVE — DEPARTMENT OF TREASURY BRIEFING — commercial-sensitivity collocation excluded from the QLD tier by the commercial-sensitive NOT group
• OFFICIAL: Sensitively drafted policy note avoids naming individuals — Sensitively (adverb) must not match the OFFICIAL: Sensitive stem after the trailing \b fix
• Public marking guide: Classification: OFFICIAL: Sensitive — Public guidance quotes a formal sensitive marking
• Template example: X-Protective-Marking: VER=2024.1, NS=gov.au, SEC=OFFICIAL:Sensitive — Template contains a complete formal header

Known false positives

• Uppercase SENSITIVE in non-marking headings (e.g. "COMMERCIALLY SENSITIVE"). Mitigation: QLD tier requires Australian-government corroborative evidence within 300 characters, and a dedicated NOT group excludes commercial-sensitivity collocations.
• ALL-CAPS prose (legal boilerplate, headers, or documents rendered entirely in capitals) defeats the case-sensitivity signal the bare SENSITIVE banner relies on — any all-caps rendering of the word can fire with no protective-marking intent. Mitigation: Treat QLD-tier-only hits as lower confidence when the surrounding text is itself all-caps; the OFFICIAL: Sensitive stem tier (90) remains the reliable signal.

Collections

• Government Protective Markings