Skip to content

Apollo Gateway Query Planner Vulnerable to Excessive Resource Consumption via Named Fragment Expansion

High severity GitHub Reviewed Published Apr 7, 2025 in apollographql/federation • Updated Apr 7, 2025

Package

npm @apollo/gateway (npm)

Affected versions

< 2.10.1

Patched versions

2.10.1

Description

Impact

Summary

A vulnerability in Apollo Gateway allowed queries with deeply nested and reused named fragments to be prohibitively expensive to query plan, specifically during named fragment expansion. This could lead to excessive resource consumption and denial of service.

Details

Named fragments were being expanded once per fragment spread during query planning, leading to exponential resource usage when deeply nested and reused fragments were involved.

Fix/Mitigation

A new Query Fragment Expansion Limit metric has been introduced:

  • This metric computes the number of selections a query would have if its fragment spreads were fully expanded.
  • The metric is checked against a limit to prevent excessive computation.

Patches

This has been remediated in @apollo/gateway version 2.10.1.

Workarounds

No known direct workarounds exist.

References

Query Planning Documentation

Acknowledgements

We appreciate the efforts of the security community in identifying and improving the performance and security of query planning mechanisms.

References

@jasonbarnett667 jasonbarnett667 published to apollographql/federation Apr 7, 2025
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Apr 7, 2025
Reviewed Apr 7, 2025
Last updated Apr 7, 2025

Severity

High

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

EPSS score

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2025-32030

GHSA ID

GHSA-q2f9-x4p4-7xmh

Source code

Loading Checking history
See something to contribute? Suggest improvements for this vulnerability.