CVE-2026-42793CWE-770

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

High · published May 8, 2026

CVSS v4.0
8.2
EPSS
1%
Percentile
52.6
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v4.0
8.2 · HIGH
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
EPSS
0.00700 · 52.6th percentile
Weakness
CWE-770 · Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Published
2026-05-08T15:42Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 08 MAY 15:42Z
    Atom table exhaustion via attacker-controlled GraphQL SDL names in absinthe
    cvelistv5