CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-49298

HighCVSS 8.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.49%

39th percentile - higher than 39% of all known CVEs

Summary

A bug in Apache Airflow's KubernetesExecutor caused JWT tokens used by worker pods to authenticate against the Execution API to be passed as command-line arguments visible in the pod spec. An authenticated user with read-only Kubernetes access (e.g., `pods/get`) could harvest the JWT from `kubectl describe pod` output and call state-mutating Execution API endpoints.

Risk Assessment

The risk is privilege escalation: an attacker with limited Kubernetes access can gain full control over Airflow task execution, including triggering DAG runs, clearing runs, and reading/writing Variables, Connections, and XComs, potentially compromising data confidentiality and integrity.

Recommendation

Upgrade Apache Airflow to version 3.2.2 or later immediately. If the CVE-2026-27173 fix for `apache-airflow-providers-cncf-kubernetes` was already applied, the core Airflow update is still required as the two fixes are complementary.

Other vulnerabilities in Apache Airflow

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

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.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS