CVE-2026-49298 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.8) CWE-538 vulnerability in apache-airflow-core. O3 Security confirms whether CVE-2026-49298 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
Apache Airflow: JWT Token Exposure in KubernetesExecutor Command-Line Arguments
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-49298.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-49298 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 358,648 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
apache-airflow-coreReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
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, 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 Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | apache-airflow-core | all versions | 3.2.2 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for apache-airflow-core. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update apache-airflow-core to 3.2.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-49298 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 pinpoints whether CVE-2026-49298 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to CVE-2026-49298. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-49298 in your dependencies?
O3 detects CVE-2026-49298 across PyPI dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.