Apache Airflow environment-variable secrets backend permits cross-team credential use
Moderate severity
GitHub Reviewed
Published
Aug 12, 2026
to the GitHub Advisory Database
•
Updated Oct 2, 2026
Description
Published by the National Vulnerability Database
Aug 12, 2026
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database
Aug 12, 2026
Reviewed
Oct 2, 2026
Last updated
Oct 2, 2026
Apache Airflow's environment-variable secrets backend resolved a team-scoped Connection or Variable from the wrong team's scope. The guard meant to prevent this only ran when no team scope was supplied, and its pattern could not match a team name containing an underscore, which team names are allowed to contain. When the guard did not apply, the lookup fell through to an unconditional global read that resolved the stored
AIRFLOW_CONN__<TEAM>___<ID>variable regardless of which team asked. In multi-team mode an authenticated user of one team could therefore havePOST /api/v2/connections/testresolve another team's Connection and authenticate outward with that team's credentials; the endpoint uses the credentials rather than returning them. Exploitation requires[core] multi_teamenabled,[core] test_connectionset toEnabled(it shipsDisabled), team-scoped secrets provisioned as environment variables in the API-server process, and knowledge of the encoded identifier. Redirecting the test at an attacker-controlled host is separately blocked. Users are advised to upgrade to apache-airflow 3.3.1 or later.References