Spring Sweets: Hiding Sensitive Environment or Configuration Values From Actuator Endpoints

We can use Spring Boot Actuator to add endpoints to our application that can expose information about our application. For example, we can request the /env endpoint to see which Spring environment properties are available. Or use /configprops to see the values of properties defined using @ConfigurationProperties. Sensitive information like passwords and keys are replaced with ******. Spring Boot Actuator has a list of properties that have sensitive information and therefore should be replaced with ******. The default list of keys that have their value hidden is defined as password,secret,key,token,.*credentials.*,vcap_services. A value is either what the property name ends with or a regular expression. We can define our own list of property names from which the values should be hidden or sanitized and replaced with ******. We define the key we want to be hidden using the application properties endpoints.env.keys-to-sanatize and endpoints.configprops.keys-to-sanatize.

In the following example Spring application YAML configuration, we define new values for keys we want to be sanitized. Properties in our Spring environment that end with username or password should be sanitized. For properties set via @ConfigurationProperties , we want to hide values for keys that end with port and key:

# File: src/main/resources/application.yml
endpoints:
  env:
    # Hide properties that end with password and username:
    keys-to-sanitize: password,username
  configprops:
    # Also hide port and key values from the output:
    keys-to-sanitize: port,key
---
# Extra properties will be exposed
# via /env endpoint.
sample:
  username: test
  password: test

When we request the /env, we see in the output that values of properties that end with username and password are hidden:

...
    "applicationConfig: [classpath:/application.yml]": {
        ...
        "sample.password": "******",
        "sample.username": "******"
    },
...

When we request the /configprops, we see in the output that, for example, key and port properties are sanitized:

...
    "spring.metrics.export-org.springframework.boot.actuate.metrics.export.MetricExportProperties": {
        "prefix": "spring.metrics.export",
        "properties": {
            ...
            "redis": {
                "key": "******",
                "prefix": "spring.metrics.application.f2325e314fc8223e6bb8ee6ddebbbd79"
            },
            "statsd": {
                "host": null,
                "port": "******",
                "prefix": null
            }
        }
    },
...

Written with Spring Boot 1.5.2.RELEASE.