The Terraform Provider for Linode versions prior to v3.9.0 logged sensitive information including some passwords, StackScript content, object storage data, and NodeBalancer TLS keys in debug logs without redaction.
Important: Provider debug logging is not enabled by default. This issue is exposed when debug/provider logs are explicitly enabled (for example in local troubleshooting, CI/CD jobs, or centralized log collection). If enabled, sensitive values may be written to logs and then retained, shared, or exported beyond the original execution environment.
Specifically:
- Instance creation operations logged the full InstanceCreateOptions struct containing RootPass and StackScriptData
- Instance disk creation logged InstanceDiskCreateOptions containing RootPass and StackscriptData
- StackScript update operations logged the complete script content via StackscriptUpdateOptions.Script
- Image share group member creation logged tokens in ImageShareGroupAddMemberOptions.Token
- Object storage operations logged full PutObjectInput structures containing user data
- NodeBalancer config create and update operations logged NodeBalancerConfigCreateOptions and NodeBalancerConfigUpdateOptions containing the SSLKey (TLS private key)
An authenticated user with access to provider debug logs (through log aggregation systems, CI/CD pipelines, or debug output) would thus be able to extract these sensitive credentials.
// patchesUpdate to version v3.9.0 or later, which sanitizes debug logs by logging only non-sensitive metadata such as labels, regions, and resource IDs while redacting credentials, tokens, keys, scripts, and other sensitive content.
// workarounds and mitigations- Disable Terraform/provider debug logging or set it to WARN level or above
- To disable the logging, you can unset TFLOGPROVIDER and TFLOG environment variables
- Or you can set them to WARN or ERROR levels to avoid sensitive information logged in INFO and DEBUG levels.
- See Terraform docs for details: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/internals/debugging
- Restrict access to existing and historical logs
- Purge/retention-trim logs that may contain sensitive values
- Rotate potentially exposed secrets/credentials, including:
- Root passwords
- Image share group tokens
- TLS private keys/certificates used in NodeBalancer configs
- StackScript content/secrets if embedded
This issue was reported to Terraform by Hasan Sheet via Akamai's HackerOne Bug Bounty program.
// resourceshttps://github.com/linode/terraform-provider-linode/releases/tag/v3.9.0 https://github.com/linode/terraform-provider-linode/pull/2269 https://github.com/linode/terraform-provider-linode/commit/43a925d826b999f0355de3dc7330c55f496824c0
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:N/A:N
- Attack vector
- Network
- Attack complexity
- Low
- Privileges required
- Low
- User interaction
- None
- Scope
- Changed
- Confidentiality
- Low
- Integrity
- None
- Availability
- None