Public vulnerability disclosure

CVE-2026-49298

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

publishedCWE-538

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.

Technical severity8.8 highCVSS 3.1 · ADP: CISA-ADP
Published2026-06-01Source updated 2026-11-03
Collected2026-11-032 attributed sources

Fixes and workarounds

Fix

The reporting source identifies this reference as a patch. Check the advisory for affected versions and supported release branches.

Source: CNA: apache

Affected products and versions

Affected products, source version ranges and reporting authorities
ProductVersionsAuthority
Apache Airflow
Apache Software Foundation
apache-airflow
pypi
≥ 0; < 3.0.0 (affected, semver)
Other versions: unaffected
CNA: apache
Apache Airflow
Apache Software Foundation
apache-airflow-core
pypi
≥ 3.0.0; < 3.2.2 (affected, semver)
Other versions: unaffected
CNA: apache

Version ranges are source assertions. Check the vendor advisory and your installed configuration before determining exposure.

CVSS assessments

CVSS scores, vectors and reporting authorities
Version / scoreVectorAuthority
3.1 / 8.8
high
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HADP: CISA-ADP

Exploit evidence

No exploit evidence in collected sources. This is not proof of no exploitation.

References

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