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.

There are packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability referenced in the following CVE:

  - 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. (CVE-2026-49298)

ID	Name	Product	Family	Type	Severity
463678	Echo: apache-airflow-core: security update to 3.2.2	Tenable Cloud Security	Echo Local Security Checks	Local	high
463678	Echo: apache-airflow-core: security update to 3.2.2	Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security	Echo Local Security Checks	Local	high
444544	SCA: security update for apache-airflow-core (GHSA-5j6p-jrrm-6x94)	Tenable Cloud Security	SCA Checks	Local	high
444544	SCA: security update for apache-airflow-core (GHSA-5j6p-jrrm-6x94)	Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security	SCA Checks	Local	high

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2026-49298

high

Tenable Plugins

high

high

high

high