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.
// cvss v3.1 vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
Low
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High
Checked 2026-11-06 at 22:34 UTC. The most recent advisory here was published 2026-06-01. Updated continuously from NVD, GHSA, OSV and CNA feeds.