CVE-2026-68969 Apache Airflow: Bulk Variable and Connection endpoints record secret values in the audit log in cleartext
Authenticated users with audit-log access can recover cleartext secrets from bulk Variable and Connection updates due to missing log masking.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-68969?
CVE-2026-68969 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Apache Airflow, published on 12 Aug 2026. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.
Official 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.
Weakness: CWE-532
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-68969?
4 open source packages ship an affected version, including apache-airflow and airflow. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
apache-airflow PyPI | All versions | 3.3.1 |
apache-airflow PyPI | All versions | 3.3.1 |
apache-airflow PyPI | All versions | 3.3.1 |
airflow Bitnami | All versions | 3.3.1 |
Products include Apache Airflow.
How do I fix CVE-2026-68969?
Upgrade apache-airflow to 3.3.1 or later.
Is CVE-2026-68969 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-68969 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Apache Airflow
- CVE-2020-13927 Apache Airflow's Experimental API Authentication Bypass
- CVE-2020-11978 Apache Airflow Command Injection
- CVE-2026-33264 Apache Airflow: DAG author RCE on webserver via unrestricted import_string() in BaseSerialization.deserialize()
- CVE-2023-25754 Apache Airflow: Privilege escalation using airflow logs
- CVE-2023-22884 Apache Airflow, Apache Airflow MySQL Provider: Arbitrary file read via MySQL provider in Apache Airflow
Sources
Also known as BIT-airflow-2026-68969, CLEANSTART-2026-UQ32467, ECHO-7aea-0124-6d6e, GHSA-cjv4-7hp2-2x9h, MINI-683q-xfm9-f8v2, MINI-cvmq-fc3q-p9mw and 1 more.