CVE-2020-11981 Command injection via Celery broker in Apache Airflow

What is CVE-2020-11981?

CVE-2020-11981 is a critical command injection vulnerability in Apache Airflow, published on 16 Jul 2020. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

An issue was found in Apache Airflow versions 1.10.10 and below. When using CeleryExecutor, if an attacker can connect to the broker (Redis, RabbitMQ) directly, it is possible to inject commands, resulting in the celery worker running arbitrary commands.

Weakness: CWE-78

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-11981?

4 open source packages ship an affected version, including apache-airflow and airflow. It affects 1 product.

Products include Apache Airflow.

How do I fix CVE-2020-11981?

Upgrade apache-airflow to 1.10.11rc1 or later.

Upgrade, and pass arguments to programs as a list instead of through a shell. More about Command injection.

Is CVE-2020-11981 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2020-11981 exists.

Public exploit code: 1 Nuclei template and 1 proofs of concept on GitHub.

Other vulnerabilities in Apache Airflow

• CVE-2020-13927 Apache Airflow's Experimental API Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-11978 Apache Airflow Command Injection Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2026-33264 Apache Airflow: DAG author RCE on webserver via unrestricted import_string() in BaseSerialization.deserialize() Critical 9.8
• CVE-2023-25754 Apache Airflow: Privilege escalation using airflow logs Critical 9.8
• CVE-2023-22884 Apache Airflow, Apache Airflow MySQL Provider: Arbitrary file read via MySQL provider in Apache Airflow Critical 9.8

All Apache Airflow vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as BIT-airflow-2020-11981, GHSA-976r-qfjj-c24w, PYSEC-2020-15.