The vulnerability exists because the S3 server-side encryption customer key (CustomerEncryptionKey) was stored as a plain string in the SSEConfig struct. This struct is part of the main application configuration. The vulnerability description states that the /status/config endpoint exposes this configuration, and because the key was a plain string, it was serialized in plaintext. The fix, as seen in the commit, was to change the type of CustomerEncryptionKey from string to flagext.Secret. This is a special type that automatically redacts its value when marshaled to text formats like JSON or YAML, preventing it from being leaked. The function s3.Config.RegisterFlagsAndApplyDefaults was modified to handle this new secret type during configuration loading. The function s3.buildSSEConfig was also updated to correctly retrieve the key's value from the flagext.Secret object for use in S3 operations. Therefore, any runtime profile during exploitation (i.e., a request to /status/config) would involve the serialization of the SSEConfig struct, which was improperly defined.