CVE-2026-49298: Apache Airflow: JWT Token Exposure in KubernetesExecutor Command-Line Arguments

Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-06-01 · updated 2026-07-21
Weakness: CWE-538

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.

Affected products

Apache Airflow: before 3.2.2 — fixed in 3.2.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Apache Airflow 3.2.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2026-49298 or the next vulnerability affects your stack