GHSA-q2f9-x4p4-7xmh 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 Named Fragment Expansion
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 GHSA-q2f9-x4p4-7xmh.
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
GHSA-q2f9-x4p4-7xmh 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 378,567 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
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 during named fragment expansion. This could lead to excessive resource consumption and denial of service.
Details
Named fragments were being expanded once per fragment spread during query planning, leading to exponential resource usage when deeply nested and reused fragments were involved.
Fix/Mitigation
A new Query Fragment Expansion Limit metric has been introduced:
- This metric computes the number of selections a query would have if its fragment spreads were fully expanded.
- The metric is checked against a limit to prevent excessive computation.
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 |
Detection & 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 GHSA-q2f9-x4p4-7xmh 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 GHSA-q2f9-x4p4-7xmh can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-q2f9-x4p4-7xmh. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-q2f9-x4p4-7xmh in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-q2f9-x4p4-7xmh across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.