Arbitrary Class Path Import Vulnerability in Apache Airflow Scheduler

CVE-2026-45360

What is CVE-2026-45360?

A vulnerability in Apache Airflow allows a DAG author to exploit the scheduler-side deadline-reference decoder. By supplying a serialized form of a custom DeadlineReference, an attacker can specify an arbitrary class path that is imported without appropriate restrictions. This scenario is particularly dangerous in deployments where DAG-author code is less trusted than the scheduler process itself. The issue arises from the lack of an allowlist or plugin-registry gate, enabling malicious class instantiation with an active SQLAlchemy session attached. Users of Apache Airflow should upgrade to version 3.2.2 or later to mitigate this risk.

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