Am I affected?
Description
'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.
Weaknesses & attack patterns
Weakness
CWE-407
·
Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity
in catalog →
MITRE ↗
Attack patterns
CAPEC-229
·
Serialized Data Parameter Blowup
MITRE ↗
Affected — Hex / absinthe Hex.pm ↗ Repository ↗
modules · source files · routines
Affected — GitHub / absinthe-graphql/absinthe Repository ↗
modules · source files · routines
References
Credits
CVSS breakdown
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N