Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting apache-airflow-core package, versions [3.3.0,3.4.0)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.21% (12th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-PYTHON-APACHEAIRFLOWCORE-22392345
  • published10 Nov 2026
  • disclosed9 Nov 2026
  • creditAndrew Rukin

Introduced: 9 Nov 2026

NewCVE-2026-96285  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-502  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade apache-airflow-core to version 3.4.0 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data via the _decode_next_kwargs path in the scheduler's check_awaiting_input_timeouts sweep and the API server's task-instance serving route, where the stored next_kwargs payload is fully deserialized before the resulting value is checked to be a dictionary. Deserialization reconstructs nested objects of classes on the allow-list, including Airflow's own classes, and runs their constructors inside the scheduler or API server process before the dict check can reject the payload. A DAG author who controls a task's next_kwargs through the task execution API can therefore trigger constructor execution in the scheduler when the awaiting_input timeout sweep processes the task, and in the API server when the task instance is served to a worker using an older Execution API version. This is an incomplete fix for CVE-2026-67260, affecting only versions 3.3.0 and 3.3.x.

Details

Serialization is a process of converting an object into a sequence of bytes which can be persisted to a disk or database or can be sent through streams. The reverse process of creating object from sequence of bytes is called deserialization. Serialization is commonly used for communication (sharing objects between multiple hosts) and persistence (store the object state in a file or a database). It is an integral part of popular protocols like Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Java Management Extension (JMX), Java Messaging System (JMS), Action Message Format (AMF), Java Server Faces (JSF) ViewState, etc.

Deserialization of untrusted data (CWE-502) is when the application deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid, thus allowing the attacker to control the state or the flow of the execution.

CVSS Base Scores

version 4.0
version 3.1