CVE-2022-23532: neo4j-apoc-procedures is vulnerable to path traversal

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2023-01-14 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-22

Description

APOC (Awesome Procedures on Cypher) is an add-on library for Neo4j that provides hundreds of procedures and functions. A path traversal vulnerability found in the apoc.export.* procedures of apoc plugins in Neo4j Graph database. The issue allows a malicious actor to potentially break out of the expected directory. The vulnerability is such that files could only be created but not overwritten. For the vulnerability to be exploited, an attacker would need access to execute an arbitrary query, either by having access to an authenticated Neo4j client, or a Cypher injection vulnerability in an application. The minimum versions containing patch for this vulnerability are 4.4.0.12 and 4.3.0.12 and 5.3.1. As a workaround, you can control the allowlist of the procedures that can be used in your system, and/or turn off local file access by setting apoc.export.file.enabled=false.

Affected products

neo4j-contrib neo4j-apoc-procedures: before 4.3.0.12; from 4.4.0.0 before 4.4.0.12; 5.3.0 — fixed in 4.3.0.12, 4.4.0.12

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: neo4j-contrib neo4j-apoc-procedures 4.3.0.12, 4.4.0.12. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2022-23532 or the next vulnerability affects your stack