CVE-2023-45812 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-754 vulnerability in apollo-router. A fix is available for apollo-router — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Improper Check or Handling of Exceptional Conditions in apollo-router
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2023-45812.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-45812 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 378,156 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
apollo-routerReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects crates.io packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Impact
The Apollo Router is a configurable, high-performance graph router written in Rust to run a federated supergraph that uses Apollo Federation. Affected versions are subject to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) type vulnerability which causes the Router to panic and terminate when a multi-part response is sent. When users send queries to the router that uses the @defer or Subscriptions, the Router will panic.
To be vulnerable, users of Router must have a coprocessor with coprocessor.supergraph.response configured in their router.yaml and also to support either @defer or Subscriptions.
Patches
Router version 1.33.0 has a fix for this vulnerability. https://github.com/apollographql/router/pull/4014 fixes the issue.
Workarounds
For affected versions, avoid using the coprocessor supergraph response:
# do not use this stage in your coprocessor configuration
coprocessor:
supergraph:
response:
Or you can disable defer and subscriptions support:
# disable defer and subscriptions:
supergraph:
defer_support: false # enabled by default
subscription:
enabled: false # disabled by default
and continue to use the coprocessor supergraph response.
References
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🦀crates.io | apollo-router | ≥ 1.31.0&&< 1.33.0 | 1.33.0cargo update -p apollo-router --precise 1.33.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for apollo-router, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update apollo-router to 1.33.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-45812 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2023-45812 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2023-45812. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-45812 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2023-45812 across crates.io dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.