CVE-2020-11982 Insecure default config of Celery worker in Apache Airflow

What is CVE-2020-11982?

CVE-2020-11982 is a critical unsafe deserialization 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 attack can connect to the broker (Redis, RabbitMQ) directly, it was possible to insert a malicious payload directly to the broker which could lead to a deserialization attack (and thus remote code execution) on the Worker.

Weakness: CWE-502

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-11982?

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-2020-11982?

Upgrade apache-airflow to a fixed version for your release line: 1.10.11 or 1.10.11rc1.

Upgrade, and only deserialise data from trusted sources or with an allow-list of types. More about Unsafe deserialization.

Is CVE-2020-11982 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-11982 in the wild and no public exploit code.

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-2020-11982, GHSA-9g2w-5f3v-mfmm, PYSEC-2020-16.