GHSA-v23w-pppm-jh66: Silverstripe GraphQL has DDOS Vulnerability due to lack of protection against recursive queries

Impact

An attacker could use a recursive graphql query to execute a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDOS attack) against a website. This mostly affects websites with publicly exposed graphql schemas.

If your Silverstripe CMS project does not expose a public facing graphql schema, a user account is required to trigger the DDOS attack. If your site is hosted behind a content delivery network (CDN), such as Imperva or CloudFlare, this may further mitigate the risk.

The fix includes some new configuration options which you might want to tweak for your project, based on your own requirements. See the documentation in the references for details.

Patches

Patched in 3.8.2, 4.1.3, 4.2.5, 4.3.4, 5.0.3

References

• CVE-2023-40180 on silverstripe.org
• Documentation about protection against recursive or complex queries for silverstripe/graphql 4.x/5.x
• Documentation about protection against recursive or complex queries for silverstripe/graphql 3.x

Reported by

Jason Nguyen from phew (https://phew.co.nz/)

References

• GHSA-v23w-pppm-jh66
• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-40180
• silverstripe/silverstripe-graphql@f6d5976
• https://docs.silverstripe.org/en/developer_guides/graphql/security_and_best_practices/recursive_or_complex_queries
• https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/security-advisories/blob/master/silverstripe/graphql/CVE-2023-40180.yaml
• https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-graphql/tree/3.8#recursive-or-complex-queries
• https://www.silverstripe.org/download/security-releases/CVE-2023-40180