CVE-2026-43967

Quadratic fragment-name uniqueness check causes denial of service in absinthe

State
Published
Severity
8.7 High
Published
May 8, 2026
Updated
May 9, 2026
Reserved
May 4, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity vulnerability in absinthe-graphql absinthe allows unauthenticated denial of service via quadratic fragment-name uniqueness validation.

'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.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
4.08.7 HighCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:NEEF

Weaknesses

  • CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

Affected Products

ProductVersions
absintheabsinthe-graphql
  • 1.2.0 to before 1.10.2Affected
absintheabsinthe-graphql
  • 0b46e3bcc06c0d3797bacd64761b908a84646c1d to before 223600c520493dcaf95080af552c413099f92c9dAffected

References

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