CVE-2026-97636 Apache Airflow HashiCorp provider: HashiCorp Vault secrets backend: team-scope guard bypass via user-controlled key
A Dag author can bypass team-scope guards to read secrets from other teams in multi-team Airflow deployments using the HashiCorp Vault backend.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-97636?
CVE-2026-97636 is a medium-severity missing authorization vulnerability in Apache Airflow HashiCorp provider, published on 24 Sep 2026. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Apache Airflow HashiCorp provider: the HashiCorp Vault secrets backend's team-scope guard can be bypassed with a user-controlled key. In a multi-team deployment, a Dag author scoped to one team can supply a Variable key containing a path separator that causes the backend to resolve a secret belonging to a different team, because after the team-scoped lookup misses the backend falls back to a team-agnostic path concatenated from the unvalidated key. The Execution API Variables route accepts a path-shaped key, so this is reachable from ordinary Dag code.
Affects multi-team deployments using the HashiCorp Vault secrets backend. Single-team deployments are not affected, as there is no cross-team boundary to cross. This is the same class as CVE-2026-86465, CVE-2026-68870, CVE-2026-68871 and CVE-2026-68872 in the Akeyless, Azure Key Vault, Yandex Lockbox and Amazon secrets backends.
Users of apache-airflow-providers-hashicorp are recommended to upgrade to version 4.8.0 or later, which fixes the issue.
Weakness: CWE-639
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-97636?
How do I fix CVE-2026-97636?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-97636 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, and check permissions on every request on the server, not only in the interface. More about Missing authorization.
Is CVE-2026-97636 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-97636 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-42x2-wfr5-pcgx.