Vulnerability from bitnami_vulndb
When a request to the Airflow core API carries both a session cookie and an explicit Authorization: Bearer token, Airflow resolves the caller from the cookie and ignores the bearer token, inverting the intended precedence of bearer over cookie. The request then executes -- and is recorded in the audit log -- as the cookie's principal rather than the identity the client explicitly presented.
Only Apache Airflow 3.3.0 and 3.3.1 are affected. Earlier releases do not contain the code path that caches the cookie-derived user, and are not vulnerable.
Exploiting this requires an attacker to first place a valid session cookie of their own into the victim's browser or client: for example by cookie tossing from a sibling subdomain, through cross-site scripting in a separate application sharing a parent domain, or via a shared workstation. Deployments that host the Airflow UI on a domain shared with other applications are therefore the most exposed; a deployment on a dedicated domain with no co-hosted applications is not reachable this way. The consequence is principal confusion and misattributed audit records rather than a direct privilege escalation.
Users of 3.3.0 or 3.3.1 should upgrade to Apache Airflow 3.3.2 or later, which resolves the caller from the explicitly supplied credential whenever one is present.
{
"affected": [
{
"package": {
"ecosystem": "Bitnami",
"name": "airflow",
"purl": "pkg:bitnami/airflow"
},
"ranges": [
{
"events": [
{
"introduced": "3.3.0"
},
{
"fixed": "3.3.2"
}
],
"type": "SEMVER"
}
],
"severity": [
{
"score": "CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N",
"type": "CVSS_V3"
}
]
}
],
"aliases": [
"CVE-2026-82355"
],
"database_specific": {
"cpes": [
"cpe:2.3:a:apache:airflow:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*"
],
"severity": "Medium"
},
"details": "When a request to the Airflow core API carries both a session cookie and an explicit `Authorization: Bearer` token, Airflow resolves the caller from the cookie and ignores the bearer token, inverting the intended precedence of bearer over cookie. The request then executes -- and is recorded in the audit log -- as the cookie\u0027s principal rather than the identity the client explicitly presented.\n\nOnly Apache Airflow 3.3.0 and 3.3.1 are affected. Earlier releases do not contain the code path that caches the cookie-derived user, and are not vulnerable.\n\nExploiting this requires an attacker to first place a valid session cookie of their own into the victim\u0027s browser or client: for example by cookie tossing from a sibling subdomain, through cross-site scripting in a separate application sharing a parent domain, or via a shared workstation. Deployments that host the Airflow UI on a domain shared with other applications are therefore the most exposed; a deployment on a dedicated domain with no co-hosted applications is not reachable this way. The consequence is principal confusion and misattributed audit records rather than a direct privilege escalation.\n\nUsers of 3.3.0 or 3.3.1 should upgrade to Apache Airflow 3.3.2 or later, which resolves the caller from the explicitly supplied credential whenever one is present.",
"id": "BIT-airflow-2026-82355",
"modified": "2026-09-26T09:13:27.730Z",
"published": "2026-09-26T08:41:41.787Z",
"references": [
{
"type": "ADVISORY",
"url": "http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/09/21/4"
},
{
"type": "FIX",
"url": "https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/72225"
},
{
"type": "FIX",
"url": "https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/72723"
},
{
"type": "ADVISORY",
"url": "https://lists.apache.org/thread/3p7zpdvv40tn01m0xk5mt2rxg88mw8w1"
},
{
"type": "WEB",
"url": "https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-82355"
}
],
"schema_version": "1.6.2",
"summary": "Apache Airflow: Session cookie silently overrides explicit Authorization bearer header, enabling session fixation"
}
Sightings
| Author | Source | Type | Date | Other |
|---|
Nomenclature
- Seen: The vulnerability was mentioned, discussed, or observed by the user.
- Confirmed: The vulnerability has been validated from an analyst's perspective.
- Published Proof of Concept: A public proof of concept is available for this vulnerability.
- Exploited: The vulnerability was observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
- Patched: The vulnerability was observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
- Not exploited: The vulnerability was not observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
- Not confirmed: The user expressed doubt about the validity of the vulnerability.
- Not patched: The vulnerability was not observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
The approach is described in our paper Mapping CVEs to MITRE ATT&CK Techniques: A Curated Gold-Set Classifier and the Limits of LLM-Assisted Label Expansion.
Browse all ATT&CK techniques and the vulnerabilities related to each.
Related by attack behaviour
Vulnerabilities whose description is nearest to this one in the vector space of the CIRCL/vulnerability-attack-technique-biencoder model. This is a similarity search over the bi-encoder space (plain cosine), not a classification, and it has no measured accuracy.