CVE-2024-28101: Apollo Router's Compressed Payloads do not respect HTTP Payload Limits

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2024-03-21 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-409

Description

The Apollo Router is a graph router written in Rust to run a federated supergraph that uses Apollo Federation. Versions 0.9.5 until 1.40.2 are subject to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) type vulnerability. When receiving compressed HTTP payloads, affected versions of the Router evaluate the `limits.http_max_request_bytes` configuration option after the entirety of the compressed payload is decompressed. If affected versions of the Router receive highly compressed payloads, this could result in significant memory consumption while the compressed payload is expanded. Router version 1.40.2 has a fix for the vulnerability. Those who are unable to upgrade may be able to implement mitigations at proxies or load balancers positioned in front of their Router fleet (e.g. Nginx, HAProxy, or cloud-native WAF services) by creating limits on HTTP body upload size.

Affected products

apollographql router: from 0.9.5 before 1.40.2 — fixed in 1.40.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: apollographql router 1.40.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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