Apache Airflow's official documentation for passing parameters when triggering DAGs included an example using BashOperator with a bash_command that directly interpolated user-supplied conf parameters without quoting or sanitization. This allowed authenticated users with permission to trigger DAGs to inject shell metacharacters via the conf field, leading to potential remote code execution on the worker node. The vulnerability is due to improper neutralization of special elements in the template engine (CWE-1336). The issue affects deployments that implemented DAG code based on the vulnerable documentation example, specifically version 3.0.0. The fix involved updating the documentation to include explicit shell quoting and safety warnings. Users should upgrade to Apache Airflow 3.2.2 or later to obtain the corrected documentation and mitigate the risk.

An authenticated user with permission to trigger DAGs can supply malicious input in the conf parameter that leads to shell command injection on the worker node. This can result in arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the Airflow worker process. The vulnerability has a CVSS score of 9.1 (critical), indicating high confidentiality and integrity impact but no availability impact. There are no known exploits in the wild at this time.

Users should upgrade to Apache Airflow version 3.2.2 or later, which includes the corrected documentation with explicit shell quoting and safety caveats. The vendor advisory does not indicate a direct code patch but emphasizes the importance of following the updated safe usage patterns. Deployments modeled on the vulnerable documentation example should review and update their DAG code to properly sanitize or quote parameters passed to BashOperator to prevent shell injection.