CyberRota Analysis
AI-GeneratedApache Airflow is vulnerable due to the exposure of sensitive Variable values and Connection `extra` contents in cleartext within audit logs when submitted through bulk endpoints. This flaw allows any authenticated user with read access to the audit logs to retrieve sensitive information, including secrets, without needing specific permissions for Variables or Connections. Organizations using Apache Airflow, particularly those with multiple authenticated users, should prioritize upgrading to version 3.3.1 or later to mitigate this risk.
Public Exploit Signal
A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.
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Original NVD Description
Apache Airflow wrote Variable values and Connection `extra` contents to the audit log in cleartext when they were submitted through the bulk endpoints (`PATCH /api/v2/variables` and `PATCH /api/v2/connections`). The audit-log masking recognised only top-level request fields, and a bulk request nests its entities two levels below, so no masking was applied to them. Any authenticated user with audit-log read access -- who need not hold Variables or Connections read at all -- could recover those secrets verbatim, and the Connection `extra` copy is stored unencrypted in the log while the connection table encrypts it. The Airflow UI's *Import Variables* action posts to this endpoint, so an ordinary operator import wrote every secret in the file to the log. This is a different code path from CVE-2026-50204: that fix shipped in 3.3.0 and covers the single-entity endpoints only, so deployments that upgraded in response to that advisory remain affected and must upgrade again. Users are advised to upgrade to apache-airflow 3.3.1 or later.
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