At some point you just need to stop looking and be blissfully ignorant...this was not one of those days.
In and update to my previously updated blog article, I have found another instance where the plaintext password was written to system logs. This time I found it in more persistent log. This is actually a worse problem than the one I previously reported on.
The previous examples were found in the unified logs which can hang around for a few weeks, this new example stores the exact same information in the system's /var/log/install.log. I have found that the install.log will only get wiped out upon major re-installation (ie: 10.11 -> 10.12 -> 10.13), therefore these plaintext passwords will hang around for quite a bit longer than a few weeks! I had entries dating back to when I originally installed High Sierra on this system back in November of 2017!
Twitter user @sirkkalap, was unable to re-create what I previously reported on. I finally got some time this afternoon to re-test. As it turns out, I was unable to re-create my results from 03/24. I assumed that at some point in the past few days a silent security update was pushed out. I went to my install.log file to investigate further. As far as updates go - the only thing that has potential to be the cause of the fix is a GateKeeper ConfigData update v138 (com.apple.pkg.GatekeeperConfigData.16U1432). I have not investigated if this was the true cause. I have not updated to 10.13.4 yet, this was on 10.13.3.
During this investigations I was VERY surprised to see the same diskmanagementd logs that I had found in the unified logs. Why are they logged in the software installation log at all, I have no clue. It makes absolutely no sense to me.