Vulnerabilities

Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity vulnerability in absinthe-graphql absinthe allows unauthenticated denial of service via quadratic fragment-name uniqueness validation. 'Elixir.Absinthe.Phase.Document.Validation.UniqueFragmentNames':run/2 iterates over all fragments and for each one calls duplicate?/2, which evaluates Enum.count(fragments, &(&1.name == name)) — a full linear scan of the fragment list. The result is O(N²) comparisons per document, where N is the number of fragment definitions supplied by the caller. Because input.fragments is built directly from the GraphQL query body, N is fully attacker-controlled. A minimum-size fragment definition is roughly 16 bytes, so a ~1 MB document carries ~60,000 fragments and forces ~3.6 × 10⁹ comparisons inside this single validation phase. No authentication, schema knowledge, or special configuration is required. This issue affects absinthe: from 1.2.0 before 1.10.2.

Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation (XSS) vulnerability in absinthe-graphql absinthe_plug allows reflected cross-site scripting via the GraphiQL interface. 'Elixir.Absinthe.Plug.GraphiQL':js_escape/1 in lib/absinthe/plug/graphiql.ex escapes single quotes and newlines in the query GET parameter before embedding it in an inline JavaScript string, but does not escape backslashes. An attacker can bypass the escaping by prefixing a quote with a backslash (e.g. \'), breaking out of the string context and executing arbitrary JavaScript in the victim's browser. This issue affects absinthe_plug: from 1.2.0 before 1.5.10.

Apollo MCP Server is a Model Context Protocol server that exposes GraphQL operations as MCP tools. Prior to version 1.7.0, the Apollo MCP Server did not validate the Host header on incoming HTTP requests when using StreamableHTTP transport. In configurations where an HTTP-based MCP server is run on localhost without additional authentication or network-level controls, this could potentially allow a malicious website—visited by a user running the server locally—to use DNS rebinding techniques to bypass same-origin policy restrictions and issue requests to the local MCP server. If successfully exploited, this could allow an attacker to invoke tools or access resources exposed by the MCP server on behalf of the local user. This issue is limited to HTTP-based transport modes (StreamableHTTP). It does not affect servers using stdio transport. The practical risk is further reduced in deployments that use authentication, network-level access controls, or are not bound to localhost. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.7.0.

Apollo Server is an open-source, spec-compliant GraphQL server that's compatible with any GraphQL client, including Apollo Client. In versions from 2.0.0 to 3.13.0, 4.2.0 to before 4.13.0, and 5.0.0 to before 5.4.0, the default configuration of startStandaloneServer from @apollo/server/standalone is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks through specially crafted request bodies with exotic character set encodings. This issue does not affect users that use @apollo/server as a dependency for integration packages, like @as-integrations/express5 or @as-integrations/next, only direct usage of startStandaloneServer.

Apollo Gateway provides utilities for combining multiple GraphQL microservices into a single GraphQL endpoint. Prior to 2.10.1, a vulnerability in Apollo Gateway allowed queries with deeply nested and reused named fragments to be prohibitively expensive to query plan, specifically due to internal optimizations being frequently bypassed. The query planner includes an optimization that significantly speeds up planning for applicable GraphQL selections. However, queries with deeply nested and reused named fragments can generate many selections where this optimization does not apply, leading to significantly longer planning times. Because the query planner does not enforce a timeout, a small number of such queries can render gateway inoperable. This could lead to excessive resource consumption and denial of service. This has been remediated in @apollo/gateway version 2.10.1.

Apollo Federation is an architecture for declaratively composing APIs into a unified graph. Each team can own their slice of the graph independently, empowering them to deliver autonomously and incrementally. Instances of @apollo/query-planner >=2.0.0 and =2.0.0 and < 2.8.5 and Apollo Router <1.52.1 are also impacted through their use of @apollo/query-panner. If @apollo/query-planner is asked to plan a sufficiently complex query, it may loop infinitely and never complete. This results in unbounded memory consumption and either a crash or out-of-memory (OOM) termination. This issue can be triggered if you have at least one non-@key field that can be resolved by multiple subgraphs. To identify these shared fields, the schema for each subgraph must be reviewed. The mechanism to identify shared fields varies based on the version of Federation your subgraphs are using. You can check if your subgraphs are using Federation 1 or Federation 2 by reviewing their schemas. Federation 2 subgraph schemas will contain a @link directive referencing the version of Federation being used while Federation 1 subgraphs will not. For example, in a Federation 2 subgraph, you will find a line like @link(url: "https://specs.apollo.dev/federation/v2.0"). If a similar @link directive is not present in your subgraph schema, it is using Federation 1. Note that a supergraph can contain a mix of Federation 1 and Federation 2 subgraphs. This issue results from the Apollo query planner attempting to use a Number exceeding Javascript’s Number.MAX_VALUE in some cases. In Javascript, Number.MAX_VALUE is (2^1024 - 2^971). When the query planner receives an inbound graphql request, it breaks the query into pieces and for each piece, generates a list of potential execution steps to solve the piece. These candidates represent the steps that the query planner will take to satisfy the pieces of the larger query. As part of normal operations, the query planner requires and calculates the number of possible query plans for the total query. That is, it needs the product of the number of query plan candidates for each piece of the query. Under normal circumstances, after generating all query plan candidates and calculating the number of all permutations, the query planner moves on to stack rank candidates and prune less-than-optimal options. In particularly complex queries, especially those where fields can be solved through multiple subgraphs, this can cause the number of all query plan permutations to balloon. In worst-case scenarios, this can end up being a number larger than Number.MAX_VALUE. In Javascript, if Number.MAX_VALUE is exceeded, Javascript represents the value as “infinity”. If the count of candidates is evaluated as infinity, the component of the query planner responsible for pruning less-than-optimal query plans does not actually prune candidates, causing the query planner to evaluate many orders of magnitude more query plan candidates than necessary. This issue has been addressed in @apollo/query-planner v2.8.5, @apollo/gateway v2.8.5, and Apollo Router v1.52.1. Users are advised to upgrade. This issue can be avoided by ensuring there are no fields resolvable from multiple subgraphs. If all subgraphs are using Federation 2, you can confirm that you are not impacted by ensuring that none of your subgraph schemas use the @shareable directive. If you are using Federation 1 subgraphs, you will need to validate that there are no fields resolvable by multiple subgraphs.

The Apollo Router is a graph router written in Rust to run a federated supergraph that uses Apollo Federation. Versions 0.9.5 until 1.40.2 are subject to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) type vulnerability. When receiving compressed HTTP payloads, affected versions of the Router evaluate the `limits.http_max_request_bytes` configuration option after the entirety of the compressed payload is decompressed. If affected versions of the Router receive highly compressed payloads, this could result in significant memory consumption while the compressed payload is expanded. Router version 1.40.2 has a fix for the vulnerability. Those who are unable to upgrade may be able to implement mitigations at proxies or load balancers positioned in front of their Router fleet (e.g. Nginx, HAProxy, or cloud-native WAF services) by creating limits on HTTP body upload size.

apollo-client-nextjs is the Apollo Client support for the Next.js App Router. The @apollo/experimental-apollo-client-nextjs NPM package is vulnerable to a cross-site scripting vulnerability. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would need to either inject malicious input (e.g. by redirecting a user to a specifically-crafted link) or arrange to have malicious input be returned by a GraphQL server (e.g. by persisting it in a database). To fix this issue, please update to version 0.7.0 or later.

The Apollo Router is a configurable, high-performance graph router written in Rust to run a federated supergraph that uses Apollo Federation. Affected versions are subject to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) type vulnerability which causes the Router to panic and terminate when a multi-part response is sent. When users send queries to the router that uses the `@defer` or Subscriptions, the Router will panic. To be vulnerable, users of Router must have a coprocessor with `coprocessor.supergraph.response` configured in their `router.yaml` and also to support either `@defer` or Subscriptions. Apollo Router version 1.33.0 has a fix for this vulnerability which was introduced in PR #4014. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade should avoid using the coprocessor supergraph response or disable defer and subscriptions support and continue to use the coprocessor supergraph response.

Altair is a GraphQL Client. Prior to version 5.2.5, the Altair GraphQL Client Desktop Application does not sanitize external URLs before passing them to the underlying system. Moreover, Altair GraphQL Client also does not isolate the context of the renderer process. This affects versions of the software running on MacOS, Windows, and Linux. Version 5.2.5 fixes this issue.

Versions of the package graphql from 16.3.0 and before 16.8.1 are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) due to insufficient checks in the OverlappingFieldsCanBeMergedRule.ts file when parsing large queries. This vulnerability allows an attacker to degrade system performance. **Note:** It was not proven that this vulnerability can crash the process.

The Apollo Router is a configurable, high-performance graph router written in Rust to run a federated supergraph that uses Apollo Federation 2. Affected versions are subject to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) type vulnerability which causes the Router to panic and terminate when GraphQL Subscriptions are enabled. It can be triggered when **all of the following conditions are met**: 1. Running Apollo Router v1.28.0, v1.28.1 or v1.29.0 ("impacted versions"); **and** 2. The Supergraph schema provided to the Router (either via Apollo Uplink or explicitly via other configuration) **has a `subscription` type** with root-fields defined; **and** 3. The YAML configuration provided to the Router **has subscriptions enabled** (they are _disabled_ by default), either by setting `enabled: true` _or_ by setting a valid `mode` within the `subscriptions` object (as seen in [subscriptions' documentation](https://www.apollographql.com/docs/router/executing-operations/subscription-support/#router-setup)); **and** 4. An [anonymous](https://spec.graphql.org/draft/#sec-Anonymous-Operation-Definitions) (i.e., un-named) `subscription` operation (e.g., `subscription { ... }`) is received by the Router If **all four** of these criteria are met, the impacted versions will panic and terminate. There is no data-privacy risk or sensitive-information exposure aspect to this vulnerability. This is fixed in Apollo Router v1.29.1. Users are advised to upgrade. Updating to v1.29.1 should be a clear and simple upgrade path for those running impacted versions. However, if Subscriptions are **not** necessary for your Graph – but are enabled via configuration — then disabling subscriptions is another option to mitigate the risk.

In GraphQL Java (aka graphql-java) before 20.1, an attacker can send a crafted GraphQL query that causes stack consumption. The fixed versions are 20.1, 19.4, 18.4, 17.5, and 0.0.0-2023-03-20T01-49-44-80e3135.

graphql-java before19.0 is vulnerable to Denial of Service. An attacker can send a malicious GraphQL query that consumes CPU resources. The fixed versions are 19.0 and later, 18.3, and 17.4, and 0.0.0-2022-07-26T05-45-04-226aabd9.

graphql-go (aka GraphQL for Go) through 0.8.0 has infinite recursion in the type definition parser.

An arbitrary file upload vulnerability in the file upload module of Graphql-upload v13.0.0 allows attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted filename.

The WPGraphQL WordPress plugin before 0.3.5 doesn't properly restrict access to information about other users' roles on the affected site. Because of this, a remote attacker could forge a GraphQL query to retrieve the account roles of every user on the site.

graphql-go is a GraphQL server with a focus on ease of use. In versions prior to 1.3.0 there exists a DoS vulnerability that is possible due to a bug in the library that would allow an attacker with specifically designed queries to cause stack overflow panics. Any user with access to the GraphQL handler can send these queries and cause stack overflows. This in turn could potentially compromise the ability of the server to serve data to its users. The issue has been patched in version `v1.3.0`. The only known workaround for this issue is to disable the `graphql.MaxDepth` option from your schema which is not recommended.

GraphiQL is the reference implementation of this monorepo, GraphQL IDE, an official project under the GraphQL Foundation. All versions of graphiql older than [email protected] are vulnerable to compromised HTTP schema introspection responses or schema prop values with malicious GraphQL type names, exposing a dynamic XSS attack surface that can allow code injection on operation autocomplete. In order for the attack to take place, the user must load a vulnerable schema in graphiql. There are a number of ways that can occur. By default, the schema URL is not attacker-controllable in graphiql or in its suggested implementations or examples, leaving only very complex attack vectors. If a custom implementation of graphiql's fetcher allows the schema URL to be set dynamically, such as a URL query parameter like ?endpoint= in graphql-playground, or a database provided value, then this custom graphiql implementation is vulnerable to phishing attacks, and thus much more readily available, low or no privelege level xss attacks. The URLs could look like any generic looking graphql schema URL. It should be noted that desktop clients such as Altair, Insomnia, Postwoman, do not appear to be impacted by this. This vulnerability does not impact codemirror-graphql, monaco-graphql or other dependents, as it exists in onHasCompletion.ts in graphiql. It does impact all forks of graphiql, and every released version of graphiql.

GraphQL Playground is a GraphQL IDE for development of graphQL focused applications. All versions of graphql-playground-react older than [email protected] are vulnerable to compromised HTTP schema introspection responses or schema prop values with malicious GraphQL type names, exposing a dynamic XSS attack surface that can allow code injection on operation autocomplete. In order for the attack to take place, the user must load a malicious schema in graphql-playground. There are several ways this can occur, including by specifying the URL to a malicious schema in the endpoint query parameter. If a user clicks on a link to a GraphQL Playground installation that specifies a malicious server, arbitrary JavaScript can run in the user's browser, which can be used to exfiltrate user credentials or other harmful goals. If you are using graphql-playground-react directly in your client app, upgrade to version 1.7.28 or later.