Vulnerability Database

346,350

Total vulnerabilities in the database

CVE-2024-35189 — ethyca-fides

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Fides is an open-source privacy engineering platform. 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. This 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. Users are also advised to rotate any Google Cloud secrets used for BigQuery integrations in their Fides deployments. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

CVSS v3:

  • Severity: Unknown
  • Score:
  • AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

Frequently Asked Questions

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.

Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.

SynScan combines attack surface monitoring and continuous security auditing to keep your inventory current, flag high-impact vulnerabilities early, and help you turn raw findings into a practical remediation plan.