GHSA-5j6p-jrrm-6x94: Apache Airflow: Execution API JWT leaked via KubernetesExecutor worker command-line args
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.
Details
Original advisory: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-5j6p-jrrm-6x94
Exploitation outlook
EPSS (FIRST.org) estimates each CVE’s probability of exploitation in the next 30 days — here is the CSIRTS.com read on those numbers.
- Low exploitation riskCVE-2026-492980.49% 30-day exploitation probability — currently an unlikely target, but scores change as exploit code circulates. Riskier than 39% of all scored CVEs.
Referenced CVEs
| CVE | CSIRTS overview | External |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2026-49298 | coverage & exploitation status | NVD · CVE.org |
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