What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-40180: Denial of service vulnerability in silverstripe-graphql via recursive queries

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2023-10-16 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-400

Description

silverstripe-graphql is a package which serves Silverstripe data in GraphQL representations. An attacker could use a recursive graphql query to execute a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDOS attack) against a website. This mostly affects websites with publicly exposed graphql schemas. If your Silverstripe CMS project does not expose a public facing graphql schema, a user account is required to trigger the DDOS attack. If your site is hosted behind a content delivery network (CDN), such as Imperva or CloudFlare, this may further mitigate the risk. This issue has been addressed in versions 3.8.2, 4.1.3, 4.2.5, 4.3.4, and 5.0.3. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Affected products

• silverstripe-graphql: from 3.0.0 before 3.8.2; from 4.0.0 before 4.1.3; from 4.2.0 before 4.2.5; from 4.3.0 before 4.3.4; from 5.0.0 before 5.0.3 — fixed in 3.8.2, 4.1.3, 4.2.5, 4.3.4, 5.0.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: silverstripe-graphql 3.8.2, 4.1.3, 4.2.5, 4.3.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://docs.silverstripe.org/en/developer_guides/graphql/security_and_best_practices/recursive_or_complex_queries
• https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-graphql/commit/f6d5976ec4608e51184b0db1ee5b9e9a99d2501c
• https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-graphql/security/advisories/GHSA-v23w-pppm-jh66
• https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-graphql/tree/3.8#recursive-or-complex-queries
• https://www.silverstripe.org/download/security-releases/CVE-2023-40180
• https://docs.silverstripe.org/en/developer_guides/graphql/security_and_best_practices/recursive_or_complex_queries
• https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-graphql/commit/f6d5976ec4608e51184b0db1ee5b9e9a99d2501c
• https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-graphql/security/advisories/GHSA-v23w-pppm-jh66
• https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-graphql/tree/3.8#recursive-or-complex-queries
• https://www.silverstripe.org/download/security-releases/CVE-2023-40180

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