Fides is an open-source privacy engineering platform. The Fides webserver requires a connection to a hosted PostgreSQL database for persistent storage of application data. If the password used by the webserver for this database connection includes special characters such as @ and $, webserver startup fails and the part of the password following the special character is exposed in webserver error logs. This is caused by improper escaping of the SQLAlchemy password string. As a result users are subject to a partial exposure of hosted database password in webserver logs. The vulnerability has been patched in Fides version 2.37.0. Users are advised to upgrade to this version or later to secure their systems against this threat. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.
The product prepares a structured message for communication with another component, but encoding or escaping of the data is either missing or done incorrectly. As a result, the intended structure of the message is not preserved.
Improper encoding or escaping can allow attackers to change the commands that are sent to another component, inserting malicious commands instead. Most products follow a certain protocol that uses structured messages for communication between components, such as queries or commands. These structured messages can contain raw data interspersed with metadata or control information. For example, “GET /index.html HTTP/1.1” is a structured message containing a command (“GET”) with a single argument ("/index.html") and metadata about which protocol version is being used (“HTTP/1.1”). If an application uses attacker-supplied inputs to construct a structured message without properly encoding or escaping, then the attacker could insert special characters that will cause the data to be interpreted as control information or metadata. Consequently, the component that receives the output will perform the wrong operations, or otherwise interpret the data incorrectly.