Apollo RouterApplication · Apollographql

CVE-2024-43414

HIGH · 7.5 CVSS v3.1 Published 2024-08-27
Fix available
A fix is available. Upgrade to 1.52.1 / 2.8.5 or later.
See remediation →
84/100
Remediation priority · High
Public exploit Remotely reachable No privileges Zero-click

Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.

NVD · unedited
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 <2.8.5 are impacted by a denial-of-service vulnerability. @apollo/gateway versions >=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.

Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.

dbcve analysis

A detailed technical summary for this CVE is being prepared.

Affected products & versions What the vendor confirmedThe version ranges the vendor confirmed as vulnerable. If your version sits inside a range here, treat yourself as exposed until you have upgraded.

NVD · CPE data
Apollo RouterApplication
Affected:< 1.52.1
Apollo GatewayApplication
Affected:>= 2.0.0, < 2.8.5
Apollo Helms Charts RouterApplication
Affected:< 1.52.1
Apollo Query PlannerApplication
Affected:>= 2.0.0, < 2.8.5
Apollo RouterApplication
Affected:< 1.52.1

CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.

From the vector
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.

dbcve · scoped
Upgrade available Upgrade to 1.52.1 / 2.8.5 or later
Fixed in 1.52.12.8.5
Recommended fix High confidence

Apollo Router >=1.52.1, @apollo/gateway >=2.8.5, @apollo/query-planner >=2.8.5

  1. 1. Identify which Apollo Federation components are in use: Apollo Router, Apollo Gateway, and/or @apollo/query-planner
  2. 2. Determine the current version of each component by checking your dependency files (package.json, Cargo.toml, or Helm chart values.yaml)
  3. 3. For Apollo Router: upgrade to version 1.52.1 or later
  4. 4. For Apollo Gateway: upgrade to version 2.8.5 or later
  5. 5. For @apollo/query-planner: upgrade to version 2.8.5 or later
  6. 6. If using Apollo Router via Helm charts, upgrade the Apollo Router Helm chart to a version that bundles router 1.52.1 or later
  7. 7. After upgrading, verify that the components start successfully and handle complex queries without hanging or excessive memory usage

Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.

We can perform the upgrade in your staging environment and verify nothing breaks — typical engagement from $1,950. Get the upgrade done

Scan for this in your stack

Free · runs locally
dbcve dependency scanner

Check whether your project pulls in CVE-2024-43414 — or any other known-vulnerable package — straight from your lock files. Free and open source; it runs locally and uploads nothing.

References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.

Primary sources

Practitioner notes

Contributed

Peer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2024-43414 in production — separate from our analysis above.

No notes yet

Be the first to add a field note for this CVE — a mitigation you’ve verified, a version caveat, or a link to a working fix. Sign in above to contribute.

What this is

A place for practitioners to share what actually worked: a mitigation you’ve tested, a configuration change, a version- or environment-specific caveat, or a link to a verified patch. The most useful notes rise to the top as peers upvote them, so the signal stays high.

What belongs here
  • Verified mitigations, workarounds, and config changes
  • Version or environment caveats, and links to real fixes
  • No weaponised exploit code, or anything meant to cause harm
  • No spam, self-promotion, credentials, or personal data