Breaking out of message brokers

**Executive summary:** This post describes two Airflow vulnerabilities—a pickle-based deserialization RCE (CVE-2020-11982) and a command injection flaw (CVE-2020-11981)—that allow an attacker with access to the message broker (Redis/RabbitMQ/Celery) to inject tasks or commands and achieve arbitrary code execution on Airflow worker machines; the author provides PoC steps, discusses impact and remediation (sanitizing broker-held commands and securing brokers with authentication/TLS), and warns against over-trusting message brokers.