What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-11978: Apache Airflow Command Injection

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: yes — in CISA KEV since 2022-01-18
• EPSS: 99.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2020-07-17 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-78

Description

An issue was found in Apache Airflow versions 1.10.10 and below. A remote code/command injection vulnerability was discovered in one of the example DAGs shipped with Airflow which would allow any authenticated user to run arbitrary commands as the user running airflow worker/scheduler (depending on the executor in use). If you already have examples disabled by setting load_examples=False in the config then you are not vulnerable.

Affected products

• Apache Airflow: before 1.10.11 — fixed in 1.10.11

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Apache Airflow 1.10.11. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/162908/Apache-Airflow-1.10.10-Remote-Code-Execution.html
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/174764/Apache-Airflow-1.10.10-Remote-Code-Execution.html
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r7255cf0be3566f23a768e2a04b40fb09e52fcd1872695428ba9afe91%40%3Cusers.airflow.apache.org%3E
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/162908/Apache-Airflow-1.10.10-Remote-Code-Execution.html
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/174764/Apache-Airflow-1.10.10-Remote-Code-Execution.html
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r7255cf0be3566f23a768e2a04b40fb09e52fcd1872695428ba9afe91%40%3Cusers.airflow.apache.org%3E
• https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog?field_cve=CVE-2020-11978

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