🛡️ Sentinel: [MEDIUM] Fix information leakage in authentication exceptions

.jules/sentinel.md

@@ -21,3 +21,15 @@ Hardcoded credentials pose a critical risk because they provide an easy entry po
 **Prevention:**
 1. Never commit secrets, API keys, or passwords into the source code repository. Always read sensitive configuration using environment variables (e.g., `os.getenv`).
 2. Implement secure comparisons utilizing functions designed to prevent timing attacks, like `secrets.compare_digest()`, and properly encode inputs to prevent TypeErrors on non-ASCII characters.
+
+## 2024-05-20 - Exception Information Leakage in Authentication
+
+**Vulnerability:**
+The `admin_login` route in `main.py` had an overly broad `except Exception as e:` block that directly re-raised unexpected general exceptions as `HTTPException` with `detail=str(e)`. This can inadvertently expose sensitive internal details (e.g., database connection strings, stack traces) to external clients.
+
+**Learning:**
+General exceptions must never leak exact error strings to the user, as they could contain internal context useful for exploitation.
+
+**Prevention:**
+1. Catch specific exceptions (like `HTTPException` for auth/config errors) and explicitly handle them.
+2. For unhandled exceptions (`Exception`), log the detailed string internally and return a generic error message (like "An internal error occurred") to the client.

main.py

@@ -92,9 +92,12 @@ async def admin_login(login_request: models.LoginRequest, response: Response):
         sessions[session_id] = login_request.username  # Map session ID to username
         response.set_cookie("session_id", session_id, httponly=True)
         return {"message": "Login successful"}
+    except HTTPException:
+        # Re-raise HTTPExceptions (like 401 Unauthorized or 500 configuration errors) to preserve them
+        raise
     except Exception as e:
         logging.error(f"Login failed for {login_request.username}: {str(e)}")
-        raise HTTPException(status_code=401, detail=str(e))  # Unauthorized
+        raise HTTPException(status_code=500, detail="An internal error occurred during login")
 
 # Admin logout route
 @app.post("/admin/logout/")