VMware Spring Tools for Eclipse: cleartext storage

Spring Tools for Eclipse stores the Spring Boot DevTools remote secret (spring.devtools.remote.secret) as a plain string attribute on the "Spring Boot DevTools Client" launch configuration. Eclipse persists launch configuration attributes as cleartext XML, either to workspace metadata or, if the user marks the configuration as a shared file, directly into the project tree where it can be committed to version control. This secret is the sole credential protecting the DevTools remote restart/reload endpoint, which accepts and executes arbitrary class bytes on the target application. Anyone able to read the .launch file (via filesystem access, a workspace backup, or a shared VCS repository) can extract the secret and use it to achieve remote code execution against the associated Spring Boot application.

Affected Spring Products and Versions:

Spring Tools for Eclipse: 5.2.0 and earlier