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Insertion of Sensitive Information into Externally-Accessible File or Directory

CVE-2026-49298

Severity High
Score 8.8/10

Summary

A bug in Apache Airflow's KubernetesExecutor caused JWT tokens used by worker pods to authenticate against the Execution API to be passed to the worker container as command-line arguments visible in the pod spec. An authenticated UI/API user with Kubernetes read-only access to the cluster (e.g. `pods/get` in the Airflow namespace) could harvest the JWT from `kubectl describe pod` output and then call state-mutating Execution API endpoints triggering Dag runs, clearing runs, reading or writing Variables / Connections / XComs as if they were a running task. Affects deployments using the `KubernetesExecutor`. Users are advised to upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later. This is the airflow-core half of the same vulnerability addressed by [CVE-2026-27173](https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-27173), which shipped the apache-airflow-providers-cncf-kubernetes side of the fix. Deployments that already upgraded `apache-airflow-providers-cncf-kubernetes` to 10.17.0 or later per the CVE-2026-27173 advisory should additionally upgrade `apache-airflow` to 3.2.2 or later to close the core-side surface the two fixes are complementary, not duplicates. All versions prior to 3.2.2 are affected.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • HIGH
  • HIGH

CWE-538 - Insertion of Sensitive Information into Externally-Accessible File or Directory

The product places sensitive information into files or directories that are accessible to actors who are allowed to have access to the files, but not to the sensitive information.

Advisory Timeline

  • Published