In most cases, trust boundaries are violated when a secret is exposed in a source code repository or an uncontrolled deployment environment.
Unintended people who don’t need to know the secret might get access to it. They might then be able to use it to gain unwanted access to associated
services or resources.
The trust issue can be more or less severe depending on the people’s role and entitlement.
What is the potential impact?
If a Flask secret key leaks to an unintended audience, it can have serious security implications for the corresponding application. The secret key
is used to sign cookies and other sensitive data so that an attacker could potentially use it to perform malicious actions.
For example, an attacker could use the secret key to create their own cookies that appear to be legitimate, allowing them to bypass authentication
and gain access to sensitive data or functionality.
In the worst-case scenario, an attacker could be able to execute arbitrary code on the application and take over its hosting server.
