Symlink Attack Affecting apache-airflow-core package, versions [,3.2.2)
Threat Intelligence
The probability is the direct output of the EPSS model, and conveys an overall sense of the threat of exploitation in the wild. The percentile measures the EPSS probability relative to all known EPSS scores. Note: This data is updated daily, relying on the latest available EPSS model version. Check out the EPSS documentation for more details.
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- published3 Jun 2026
- disclosed1 Jun 2026
- creditSilas Boch, Lakshmikanthan K
Introduced: 1 Jun 2026
CVE-2026-40861 (opens in a new tab)How to fix?
Upgrade apache-airflow-core to version 3.2.2 or higher.
Overview
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Symlink Attack where a Dag author could either:
(a) create a symlink under their task's log directory pointing to an arbitrary file readable by the API server process (read-path attack — e.g. /etc/passwd or airflow.cfg) or
(b) supply a task_id containing .. sequences accepted by the Task SDK's KEY_REGEX (write-path attack), and in both cases the FileTaskHandler resolves the log path outside the configured base_log_folder, leaking or overwriting arbitrary files.
Note:
This is only exploitable in deployments where the worker log folder is shared with the API server.
Workaround
As a defense-in-depth mitigation, the maintainers advise to deploy the worker and API server with separate log volumes so that worker-controlled paths cannot reach the API server's filesystem.