HomeCVE Intelligence › CVE-2026-42793
CVSS 7.5 HIGH Vulnerability

CVE-2026-42793: Absinthe: Unbounded atom creation from parsed directive name

Summary When Absinthe parses a GraphQL SDL document, every directive @ definition is converted into a freshly created atom without any allow-list or length cap. Because atoms are never garbage-collected and the BEAM has…

7.5CVSS Score
HIGHSeverity
NOCISA KEV
VulnerabilityImpact Type

📋 Vulnerability Details

CVE IDCVE-2026-42793
Vendorerlang
Affected Productabsinthe
Vulnerability TypeVulnerability
CVSS Score7.5 (HIGH)
Actively Exploited❌ No known exploitation
Patch StatusSee Vendor Advisory →
Reported ByCYBERDUDEBIVASH SENTINEL APEX Intelligence (via github_advisories)

🔬 Technical Analysis

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Summary

When Absinthe parses a GraphQL SDL document, every directive @ definition is converted into a freshly created atom without any allow-list or length cap. Because atoms are never garbage-collected and the BEAM has a hard ~1,048,576 atom-table limit, any application that feeds attacker-controlled SDL through Absinthe's parser can be crashed (whole VM termination) by submitting a document containing enough unique directive names. Introduced in https://github.com/absinthe-graphql/absinthe/commit/d0eae7764520d4e8e5dfff619068c0de911aec33

Details

In lib/absinthe/language/directive_definition.ex:27, the Blueprint.from_ast/2 conversion does: ``elixir Macro.underscore(node.name) |> String.to_atom() ` node.name` is taken verbatim from the parsed GraphQL document, so the atom

🎯 Known Indicators of Compromise

{"type":"sha1","value":"d0eae7764520d4e8e5dfff619068c0de911aec33","confidence_score":0.9,"first_seen":"2026-05-14","source_count":1} {"type":"url","value":"https://github.com/absinthe-graphql/absinthe/commit/d0eae7764520d4e8e5dfff619068c0de911aec33","confidence_score":0.82,"first_seen":"2026-05-14","source_count":1}

📚 Advisory References

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