CVE-2024-35189: Sensitive Data Disclosure Vulnerability in Connection Configuration Endpoints

The Fides webserver has a number of endpoints that retrieve ConnectionConfiguration records and their associated secrets which can contain sensitive data (e.g. passwords, private keys, etc.). These secrets are stored encrypted at rest (in the application database), and the associated endpoints are not meant to expose that sensitive data in plaintext to API clients, as it could be compromising.

Fides’s developers have available to them a Pydantic field-attribute (sensitive) that they can annotate as True to indicate that a given secret field should not be exposed via the API. The application has an internal function that uses sensitive annotations to mask the sensitive fields with a "**********" placeholder value.

This vulnerability is due to a bug in that function, which prevented sensitive API model fields that were nested below the root-level of a secrets object from being masked appropriately. Only the BigQuery connection configuration secrets meets these criteria: the secrets schema has a nested sensitive keyfile_creds.private_key property that is exposed in plaintext via the APIs.

Connection types other than BigQuery with sensitive fields at the root-level that are not nested are properly masked with the placeholder and are not affected by this vulnerability.