CVE-2026-43967: Quadratic fragment-name uniqueness check causes denial of service in absinthe
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.
Metrics
- CVSS v4.0
- 8.7
- Severity
- HIGH
- Fixed in
- 1.10.2
- Affected Products
- 2
- absinthe-graphql / absinthe< 1.10.2 (from 1.2.0)
- absinthe-graphql / absinthe< 223600c520493dcaf95080af552c413099f92c9d (from 0b46e3bcc06c0d3797bacd64761b908a84646c1d)
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N