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

[Rahul Vats <rahulvats () apache org>]

Severity: Moderate 

Affected versions:

- Apache Airflow (apache-airflow) before 3.2.2

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.

Credit:

Nikolai Dvoinishnikov (nikdvy () gmail com) (finder)
Anton Kuznetsov (piratusxp () gmail com) (finder)
Anish Giri (remediation developer)

References:

https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/60108
https://airflow.apache.org/
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-49298