CVE-2026-81914: Improper Neutralization of Special Elements in Data Query Logic

Apache Airflow's Google provider built Google Drive search expressions by interpolating file and folder names directly into single-quoted string literals, without escaping the quote character that delimits them. A name containing an apostrophe therefore terminated the literal early and appended clauses of the attacker's choosing to the query.

The names are frequently not written by the Dag author. In a wildcard `gcs_to_gdrive` transfer they come from the source bucket listing, so anyone able to create objects in that bucket controls them — typically an external data producer or an ingest-only service account, a different trust principal from the Dag author. An injected clause can broaden the match and so steer which file or folder the hook resolves: an upload can be directed into a folder the attacker named, and, because downloads select the most recently modified match, a download can return a file they placed rather than the one the Dag asked for.

Affects deployments passing externally-sourced names to the Google Drive hook, including wildcard `gcs_to_gdrive` transfers from buckets writable by less-trusted principals. Users are advised to upgrade to `apache-airflow-providers-google` `22.6.0` or later, which escapes quote and backslash characters in every value interpolated into a Drive query.