For improved safety, passwords and other sensitive fields for
authentication should not be included in the request URI during a POST.
Instead, they should be in the POST body where they are less likely to be
included in log files. With the merge of Gerrit change 305545,[1] the API
will now produce a warning if such fields are detected in the URI. This
should be deployed to WMF wikis with 1.28.0-wmf.16, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.28/Roadmap for the schedule.

This affects the following modules and fields:
* action=login: 'lgpassword'
* action=clientlogin, action=createaccount, action=linkaccount, and
action=changeauthenticationdata: Any fields reported as "sensitive" by
action=query&meta=authmanagerinfo or by UI or REDIRECT responses.
Currently, this affects the 'password' and 'retype' fields.

The 'lgtoken' field for action=login will now also issue a warning if
placed in the request URI. The error code for other tokens being in the
request URI has changed from 'mustposttoken' to 'mustpostparams'.

To check if your client's user agent is detected making such submissions,
you can also use ApiFeatureUsage[2] and look for
'<action>-params-in-query-string' once 1.28.0-wmf.16 is rolled out to wikis
your client is logging in to.

It is planned that these warnings will be changed to errors during 1.29.
Let's avoid having a repeat of T142155,[3] update your code ASAP instead of
waiting until it breaks. Thanks.

 [1]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/305545/
 [2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiFeatureUsage
 [3]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T142155

-- 
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
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