Summary
Apollo Router's Compressed Payloads do not respect HTTP Payload Limits
Workarounds
If you are unable to upgrade, you may be able to implement mitigations at proxies or load balancers positioned in front of your Router fleet (e.g. Nginx, HAProxy, or cloud-native WAF services) by creating limits on HTTP body upload size.
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. When receiving compressed HTTP payloads, affected versions of the Router evaluate the limits.http_max_request_bytes configuration option after the entirety of the compressed payload is decompressed. If affected versions of the Router receive highly compressed payloads, this could result in significant memory consumption while the compressed payload is expanded.
CVE-2024-28101 has a CVSS score of 7.5 (High). The vector is network-reachable, no privileges required, and no user interaction. A CVSS score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether this affects your application depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable in your environment. A fixed version is available (1.40.2); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.
Affected versions
Security releases
Kodem intelligence
Severity tells you how bad this could be in the worst case. It does not tell you whether you are exposed. Exploitability and impact are functions of runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A vulnerable package can sit in your dependency tree and never run.
Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter. Kodem's runtime-powered SCA identifies whether this CVE is reachable in your applications.
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Router version 1.40.2 has a fix for the vulnerability.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is CVE-2024-28101? CVE-2024-28101 is a high-severity security vulnerability in apollo-router (rust), affecting versions >= 0.9.5, < 1.40.2. It is fixed in 1.40.2.
- How severe is CVE-2024-28101? CVE-2024-28101 has a CVSS score of 7.5 (High). This score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether it represents real risk in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable.
- Which versions of apollo-router are affected by CVE-2024-28101? apollo-router (rust) versions >= 0.9.5, < 1.40.2 is affected.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2024-28101? Yes. CVE-2024-28101 is fixed in 1.40.2. Upgrade to this version or later.
- Is CVE-2024-28101 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether CVE-2024-28101 is exploitable in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable. A CVSS score is a worst-case rating; it does not account for your specific deployment, configuration, or usage patterns. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to show which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so you can focus on the ones that represent real risk. Get a demo
- What actually determines whether CVE-2024-28101 is exploitable, and how bad it is? Exploitability and impact are not fixed properties of a CVE. They depend on runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A high CVSS score on a dependency that never runs is not the same as real risk. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter.
- How do I fix CVE-2024-28101? Upgrade
apollo-routerto 1.40.2 or later.