CVE-2025-32031 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-770 vulnerability in @apollo/gateway. A fix is available for @apollo/gateway — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Apollo Gateway Query Planner Vulnerable to Excessive Resource Consumption via Optimization Bypass
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-2025-32031.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
@apollo/gatewaynpmDescription
Impact
Summary
A vulnerability in Apollo Gateway allowed queries with deeply nested and reused named fragments to be prohibitively expensive to query plan, specifically due to internal optimizations being frequently bypassed. This could lead to excessive resource consumption and denial of service.
Details
The query planner includes an optimization that significantly speeds up planning for applicable GraphQL selections. However, queries with deeply nested and reused named fragments can generate many selections where this optimization does not apply, leading to significantly longer planning times. Because the query planner does not enforce a timeout, a small number of such queries can render gateway inoperable.
Fix/Mitigation
- A new Query Optimization Limit metric has been added:
- This metric approximates the number of selections that cannot be skipped by the existing optimization.
- The metric is checked against a limit to prevent excessive computation.
Given the complexity of query planning optimizations, we will continue refining these solutions based on real-world performance and accuracy tests.
Patches
This has been remediated in @apollo/gateway version 2.10.1.
Workarounds
No known direct workarounds exist.
References
Acknowledgements
We appreciate the efforts of the security community in identifying and improving the performance and security of query planning mechanisms.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | @apollo/gateway | all versions | 2.10.1npm install @apollo/gateway@2.10.1 |
Affected Products
apollo gatewayapollographqlDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for @apollo/gateway, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update @apollo/gateway to 2.10.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2025-32031 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2025-32031 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.