CVE-2026-42793 PUBLISHED

Atom table exhaustion via attacker-controlled GraphQL SDL names in absinthe

Assigner: EEF
Reserved: 29.04.2026 Published: 08.05.2026 Updated: 09.05.2026

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in absinthe-graphql absinthe allows unauthenticated denial of service via atom table exhaustion when parsing attacker-controlled GraphQL SDL.

Multiple Blueprint.Draft.convert/2 implementations in Absinthe's SDL language modules call String.to_atom/1 on attacker-controlled names from parsed GraphQL SDL documents, including directive names, field names, type names, and argument names. Because atoms are never garbage-collected and the BEAM atom table has a fixed limit (default 1,048,576), each unique name permanently consumes one slot. An attacker can exhaust the atom table by submitting SDL documents containing enough unique names, causing the Erlang VM to abort with system_limit and taking down the entire node.

Any application that passes attacker-controlled GraphQL SDL through Absinthe's parser is exposed — for example, a schema-upload endpoint, a federation gateway that ingests remote SDL, or any developer tool that runs the parser over user-supplied documents.

This issue affects absinthe: from 1.5.0 before 1.10.2.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 8.2

Product Status

Vendor absinthe-graphql
Product absinthe
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 1.5.0 to 1.10.2 (excl.)
Vendor absinthe-graphql
Product absinthe
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from d0eae7764520d4e8e5dfff619068c0de911aec33 to dd842b938e3823f345c10416914ffab5d5536838 (excl.)

Credits

  • Peter Ullrich finder
  • Curtis Schiewek remediation developer

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-770 Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling CWE

Impacts

  • CAPEC-130 Excessive Allocation