mapstructure May Leak Sensitive Information in Logs When Processing Malformed Data
Summary
Use of this library in a security-critical context may result in leaking sensitive information, if used to process sensitive fields.
Details
OpenBao (and presumably HashiCorp Vault) have surfaced error messages from mapstructure as follows:
https://github.com/openbao/openbao/blob/98c3a59c040efca724353ca46ca79bd5cdbab920/sdk/framework/field_data.go#L43-L50
```go
_, _, err := d.getPrimitive(field, schema)
if err != nil {
return fmt.Errorf("error converting input for field %q: %w", field, err)
}
```
where this calls mapstructure.WeakDecode(...): https://github.com/openbao/openbao/blob/98c3a59c040efca724353ca46ca79bd5cdbab920/sdk/framework/field_data.go#L181-L193
```go
func (d *FieldData) getPrimitive(k string, schema *FieldSchema) (interface{}, bool, error) {
raw, ok := d.Raw[k]
if !ok {
return nil, false, nil
}
switch t := schema.Type; t {
case TypeBool:
var result bool
if err := mapstructure.WeakDecode(raw, &result); err != nil {
return nil, false, err
}
return result, true, nil
```
Notably, WeakDecode(...) eventually calls one of the decode helpers, which surfaces the original value:
https://github.com/go-viper/mapstructure/blob/1a66224d5e54d8757f63bd66339cf764c3292c21/mapstructure.go#L679-L686
https://github.com/go-viper/mapstructure/blob/1a66224d5e54d8757f63bd66339cf764c3292c21/mapstructure.go#L726-L730
https://github.com/go-viper/mapstructure/blob/1a66224d5e54d8757f63bd66339cf764c3292c21/mapstructure.go#L783-L787
& more.
PoC
To reproduce with OpenBao:
```
$ podman run -p 8300:8300 openbao/openbao:latest server -dev -dev-root-token-id=root -dev-listen-address=0.0.0.0:8300
```
and in a new tab:
```
$ BAO_TOKEN=root BAO_ADDR=http://localhost:8300 bao auth enable userpass
Success! Enabled userpass auth method at: userpass/
$ curl -X PUT -H "X-Vault-Request: true" -H "X-Vault-Token: root" -d '{"password":{"asdf":"my-sensitive-value"}}' "http://localhost:8300/v1/auth/userpass/users/adsf"
{"errors":["error converting input for field \"password\": '' expected type 'string', got unconvertible type 'map[string]interface {}', value: 'map[asdf:my-sensitive-value]'"]}
```
Impact
This is an information disclosure bug with little mitigation. See https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/hcsec-2025-09-vault-may-expose-sensitive-information-in-error-logs-when-processing-malformed-data-with-the-kv-v2-plugin/74717 for a previous version. That version was fixed, but this is in the second part of that error message (starting at '' expected a map, got 'string' -- when the field type is string and a map is provided, we see the above information leak -- the previous example had a map type field with a string value provided).
This was rated 4.5 Medium by HashiCorp in the past iteration.
