CVE record
CVE-2026-49298
Apache Airflow: JWT Token Exposure in KubernetesExecutor Command-Line Arguments
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 evidence
Known exploitation
Not listed in fetched KEV catalog
Absence from the fetched catalog does not establish that exploitation has not occurred.
Severity
high
CVSS 8.8 · CVSS_V3
Affected packages
1
Supported package records returned by OSV. Vendor and product names are not used to infer matches.
OSV package mapping
Affected open-source packages
| Package | Ecosystem | Fixed versions |
|---|---|---|
| apache-airflow-core | pypi | 3.2.2 |