CVE-2023-51702: Apache Airflow CNCF Kubernetes provider, Apache Airflow: Kubernetes configuration file saved without encryption in the Metadata and logged as plain text in the Triggerer service

[Ephraim Anierobi <ephraimanierobi () apache org>]

Severity: moderate

Affected versions:

- Apache Airflow CNCF Kubernetes provider 5.2.0 before 7.0.0
- Apache Airflow 2.3.0 before 2.6.1

Description:

Since version 5.2.0, when using deferrable mode with the path of a Kubernetes configuration file for authentication, 
the Airflow worker serializes this configuration file as a dictionary and sends it to the triggerer by storing it in 
metadata without any encryption. Additionally, if used with an Airflow version between 2.3.0 and 2.6.0, the 
configuration dictionary will be logged as plain text in the triggerer service without masking. This allows anyone with 
access to the metadata or triggerer log to obtain the configuration file and use it to access the Kubernetes cluster.

This behavior was changed in version 7.0.0, which stopped serializing the file contents and started providing the file 
path instead to read the contents into the trigger. Users are recommended to upgrade to version 7.0.0, which fixes this 
issue.

Credit:

Hussein Awala (finder)
Hussein Awala (remediation developer)

References:

https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/29498
https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/30110
https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/36492
https://airflow.apache.org/
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-51702