CVE-2026-49298 PUBLISHED

Apache Airflow: JWT Token Exposure in KubernetesExecutor Command-Line Arguments

Assigner: apache
Reserved: 28.05.2026 Published: 01.06.2026 Updated: 01.06.2026

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, 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.

Product Status

Vendor Apache Software Foundation
Product Apache Airflow
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 3.2.2 (excl.)

Credits

  • Nikolai Dvoinishnikov (nikdvy@gmail.com) finder
  • Anton Kuznetsov (piratusxp@gmail.com) finder
  • Anish Giri remediation developer

References

Problem Types

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