The vulnerability stemmed from password fields being pre-populated with actual credentials from environment variables. The patch introduced a $realPassword parameter to these functions to control password redaction. In vulnerable versions, these functions always returned raw environment values (SS_DATABASE_PASSWORD/SS_DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASSWORD) which were directly embedded in HTML form 'value' attributes. The functions' output was used in config-form.html rendering, making them the root cause of the disclosure. The commit modifies these exact functions to implement placeholder substitution, confirming their role in the vulnerability.