Severity: Moderate 

Affected versions:

- Apache Airflow (apache-airflow) before 3.2.2

Description:

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.

Credit:

Nikolai Dvoinishnikov ([email protected]) (finder)
Anton Kuznetsov ([email protected]) (finder)
Anish Giri (remediation developer)

References:

https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/60108
https://airflow.apache.org/
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-49298

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