Executive brief
Apache Airflow is a workflow orchestration platform used by organizations to schedule and monitor data pipelines. In multi-team deployments where the Config API is exposed, a user with only read-only configuration access could bypass security controls and extract sensitive broker credentials (like database passwords or authentication tokens) that should have been hidden, potentially exposing critical infrastructure secrets.
Technical details
The vulnerability is an information disclosure (CWE-200) caused by improper masking of sensitive configuration values in the Config API when multi-team mode is enabled. The secrets masker performs a direct membership test against registered base section and option names but fails to normalize team-prefixed sections (formatted as `[<team>=<section>]` in config files or `AIRFLOW__<TEAM>___<SECTION>__<KEY>` in environment variables) before applying the sensitivity check. An authenticated user with Viewer role and configuration-read permission can read team-scoped Celery broker URLs with embedded credentials in cleartext, while the same global configuration option is correctly masked. This is distinct from earlier masker bypass vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-48828 and CVE-2026-48892) and affects even deployments that upgraded to version 3.3.0. The fix normalizes team-scoped sections before masking checks; users should upgrade to apache-airflow 3.3.1 or later.
Affected products
- Apache Airflow before 3.3.1
Timeline
- 2026-08-12: disclosed
- 2026-08-04: patched: Fix merged in PR #70755 on apache/airflow main branch