Update dependency @apollo/server to v5 [SECURITY]

[renovate]

This PR contains the following updates:

Package	Change	Age	Confidence
@apollo/server (source)	4.9.3 → 5.5.0

GitHub Vulnerability Alerts

CVE-2026-23897

Impact

The default configuration of startStandaloneServer from @apollo/server/standalone is vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks through specially crafted request bodies with exotic character set encodings.

This issue does not affect users that use @apollo/server as a dependency for integration packages, like @as integrations/express5 or @as-integrations/next, only direct usage of startStandaloneServer.

Who is impacted

Users directly using startStandaloneServer from @apollo/server/standalone.

This issue affects Apollo Server from v5.0.0 through v5.3.x.

It also affects all releases of the end-of-life major versions v4, v3, and v2. Although Apollo Server v4 is EOL and Apollo no longer commits to providing support or updates for it, a fix for it was released in v4.13.0. Apollo Server v3 and v2 are no longer updated, as they have been EOL since 2024 and 2023 respectively.

Patches

Patches for this issue are released as @apollo/server versions 5.4.0 and 4.13.0.

In accordance with RFC 7159, these versions now only accept request bodies encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16 (LE or BE), or UTF-32 (LE or BE). Any other character set will be rejected with a 415 Unsupported Media Type error. Note that the more recent JSON RFC, [RFC 8259 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8259#section-8.1), is more strict and will only allow UTF-8. Since this is a minor release, we have chosen to remain compatible with the more permissive RFC 7159 for now. In a future major release, the restriction may be tightened further to only allow UTF-8.

Workarounds

Users of apollo-server v2 or v3 that cannot upgrade for some reason could switch from the standalone apollo-server
package to an integration package like apollo-server-express or apollo-server-koa and set up their own server. Please note that these old packages are generally EOL and do not receive any more support or bug fixes. This can only be seen as a short-term workaround. Updating to @apollo/server v5 should be a priority.

Severity

• CVSS Score: 7.5 / 10 (High)
• Vector String: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

GHSA-9q82-xgwf-vj6h

Impact

In a Cross-Site Request Forgery attack, untrusted web content causes browsers to send authenticated requests to web servers which use cookies for authentication. While the web content is prevented from reading the request's response due to the Cross-Origin Request Sharing (CORS) protocol, an attacker may be able to cause side effects in the server ("CSRF" attack), or learn something about the response via timing analysis ("XS-Search" attack).

Apollo Server has a built-in feature which prevents CSRF and XS-Search attacks: it refuses to process GraphQL requests that could possibly have been sent by a spec-compliant web browser without a protective "preflight" step. See Apollo Server's docs for more details on CORS, CSRF attacks, and Apollo Server's CSRF prevention feature.

This feature is fully effective against attacks carried out against users of spec-compliant browsers. Unfortunately, a major browser introduced a bug in 2025 which meant in certain cases, it failed to follow the CORS spec. The browser's maintainers have already committed to fixing the bug and making the browser spec-compliant again.

Even with this bug, Apollo Server's CSRF prevention feature blocks "side effect" CSRF attacks: Apollo Server will still correctly refuse to execute mutations in requests that were not preflighted. However, some specially crafted authenticated GraphQL queries can be issued across origins without preflight in buggy versions of this browser, allowing for XS-Search attacks: an attacker can analyze response times to learn facts about the responses to requests such as whether fields return null or approximately how many list entries are returned from fields.

GraphQL servers are only vulnerable if they rely on cookies (or HTTP Basic Auth) for authentication.

Patches

The vulnerability is patched in @apollo/server v5.5.0. This release contains a single change: GraphQL requests sent in HTTP GET requests which contain a Content-Type header naming a type other than application/json are rejected. (GET requests with no Content-Type are allowed.) This change prevents XS-Search attacks even in browsers which are non-compliant in ways similar to this browser.

There are no known cases where GraphQL apps depend on the ability of clients to send non-empty Content-Type headers with GET requests other than application/json, so this change has not been made configurable; if this change breaks a use case, file an issue and more configurability can be added.

Apollo is not currently providing a patch for previous major versions of Apollo Server, which are all end-of-life.

Workarounds

If upgrading is not possible, this particular browser's bug can be mitigated by preventing any HTTP request with a Content-Type header containing message/ from reaching Apollo Server (e.g. in a proxy or middleware).

For example, when using Apollo Server's Express integration, something like this can be placed before attaching expressMiddleware to the app:

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  for (let i = 0; i < req.rawHeaders.length - 1; i += 2) {
    if (
      req.rawHeaders[i].toLowerCase() === 'content-type' &&
      req.rawHeaders[i + 1].includes('message/')
    ) {
      return res.status(415).json({ error: 'Content-Type not allowed' });
    }
  }
  next();
});

While the patch prevents a broader class of similar issues, the only known way to exploit this vulnerability is against a particular browser which currently plans to ship a fix in May 2026. If it is already past June 2026 and this vulnerability has not been addressed yet, it is likely that the system is not currently vulnerable. Upgrading to the latest version of Apollo Server is still recommended for the broader protection.

Resources

The browser bug causes a similar vulnerability in Apollo Router; see GHSA-hff2-gcpx-8f4p

Severity

• CVSS Score: 6.3 / 10 (Medium)
• Vector String: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:N/VA:N/SC:L/SI:N/SA:N

---

Release Notes

apollographql/apollo-server (@​apollo/server)

v5.5.0

Compare Source

Minor Changes

• #​8191 ada1200 Thanks @​glasser! - ⚠️ SECURITY @apollo/server/standalone:

  Apollo Server now rejects GraphQL GET requests which contain a Content-Type header other than application/json (with optional parameters such as ; charset=utf-8). Any other value is now rejected with a 415 status code.

  (GraphQL GET requests without a Content-Type header are still allowed, though they do still need to contain a non-empty X-Apollo-Operation-Name or Apollo-Require-Preflight header to be processed if the default CSRF prevention feature is enabled.)

  This improvement makes Apollo Server's CSRF more resistant to browsers which implement CORS in non-spec-compliant ways. Apollo is aware of one browser which as of March 2026 has a bug which allows an attacker to circumvent Apollo Server's CSRF prevention feature to carry out read-only XS-Search-style CSRF attacks. The browser vendor is in the process of patching this vulnerability; upgrading Apollo Server to v5.5.0 mitigates this vulnerability.

  If your server uses cookies (or HTTP Basic Auth) for authentication, Apollo encourages you to upgrade to v5.5.0.

  This is technically a backwards-incompatible change. Apollo is not aware of any GraphQL clients which provide non-empty Content-Type headers with GET requests with types other than application/json. If your use case requires such requests, please file an issue and we may add more configurability in a follow-up release.

  See advisory GHSA-9q82-xgwf-vj6h for more details.

v5.4.0

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Minor Changes

• d25a5bd Thanks @​phryneas! - ⚠️ SECURITY @apollo/server/standalone:

  The default configuration of startStandaloneServer was vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks through specially crafted request bodies with exotic character set encodings.

  In accordance with RFC 7159, we now only accept request bodies encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16 (LE or BE), or UTF-32 (LE or BE).
  Any other character set will be rejected with a 415 Unsupported Media Type error.
  Note that the more recent JSON RFC, RFC 8259, is more strict and will only allow UTF-8.
  Since this is a minor release, we have chosen to remain compatible with the more permissive RFC 7159 for now.
  In a future major release, we may tighten this restriction further to only allow UTF-8.

  If you were not using startStandaloneServer, you were not affected by this vulnerability.

  Generally, please note that we provide startStandaloneServer as a convenience tool for quickly getting started with Apollo Server.
  For production deployments, we recommend using Apollo Server with a more fully-featured web server framework such as Express, Koa, or Fastify, where you have more control over security-related configuration options.

v5.3.0

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Minor Changes

• #​8062 8e54e58 Thanks @​cristunaranjo! - Allow configuration of graphql execution options (maxCoercionErrors)

  const server = new ApolloServer({
    typeDefs,
    resolvers,
    executionOptions: {
      maxCoercionErrors: 50,
    },
  });

• #​8014 26320bc Thanks @​mo4islona! - Expose graphql validation options.

  const server = new ApolloServer({
    typeDefs,
    resolvers,
    validationOptions: {
      maxErrors: 10,
    },
  });

v5.2.0

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Minor Changes

• #​8161 51acbeb Thanks @​jerelmiller! - Fix an issue where some bundlers would fail to build because of the dynamic import for the optional peer dependency on @yaacovcr/transform introduced in @apollo/server 5.1.0. To provide support for the legacy incremental format, you must now provide the legacyExperimentalExecuteIncrementally option to the ApolloServer constructor.

  import { legacyExecuteIncrementally } from '@​yaacovcr/transform';
  
  const server = new ApolloServer({
    // ...
    legacyExperimentalExecuteIncrementally: legacyExecuteIncrementally,
  });

  If the legacyExperimentalExecuteIncrementally option is not provided and the client sends an Accept header with a value of multipart/mixed; deferSpec=20220824, an error is returned by the server.

v5.1.0

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Minor Changes

• #​8148 80a1a1a Thanks @​jerelmiller! - Apollo Server now supports the incremental delivery protocol (@defer and @stream) that ships with graphql@17.0.0-alpha.9. To use the current protocol, clients must send the Accept header with a value of multipart/mixed; incrementalSpec=v0.2.

  Upgrading to 5.1 will depend on what version of graphql you have installed and whether you already support the incremental delivery protocol.

v5.0.0

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BREAKING CHANGES

Apollo Server v5 has very few breaking API changes. It is a small upgrade focused largely on adjusting which versions of Node.js and Express are supported.

Read our migration guide for more details on how to update your app.

• Dropped support for Node.js v14, v16, and v18, which are no longer under long-term support from the Node.js Foundation. Apollo Server 5 supports Node.js v20 and later; v24 is recommended. Ensure you are on a non-EOL version of Node.js before upgrading Apollo Server.
• Dropped support for versions of the graphql library older than v16.11.0. (Apollo Server 4 supports graphql v16.6.0 or later.) Upgrade graphql before upgrading Apollo Server.
• Express integration requires a separate package. In Apollo Server 4, you could import the Express 4 middleware from @apollo/server/express4, or you could import it from the separate package @as-integrations/express4. In Apollo Server 5, you must import it from the separate package. You can migrate your server to the new package before upgrading to Apollo Server 5. (You can also use @as-integrations/express5 for a middleware that works with Express 5.)
• Usage Reporting, Schema Reporting, and Subscription Callback plugins now use the Node.js built-in fetch implementation for HTTP requests by default, instead of the node-fetch npm package. If your server uses an HTTP proxy to make HTTP requests, you need to configure it in a slightly different way. See the migration guide for details.
• The server started with startStandaloneServer no longer uses Express. This is mostly invisible, but it does set slightly fewer headers. If you rely on the fact that this server is based on Express, you should explicitly use the Express middleware.
• The experimental support for incremental delivery directives @defer and @stream (which requires using a pre-release version of graphql v17) now explicitly only works with version 17.0.0-alpha.2 of graphql. Note that this supports the same incremental delivery protocol implemented by Apollo Server 4, which is not the same protocol in the latest alpha version of graphql. As this support is experimental, we may switch over from "only alpha.2 is supported" to "only a newer alpha or final release is supported, with a different protocol" during the lifetime of Apollo Server 5.
• Apollo Server is now compiled by the TypeScript compiler targeting the ES2023 standard rather than the ES2020 standard.
• Apollo Server 5 responds to requests with variable coercion errors (eg, if a number is passed in the variables map for a variable declared in the operation as a String) with a 400 status code, indicating a client error. This is also the behavior of Apollo Server 3. Apollo Server 4 mistakenly responds to these requests with a 200 status code by default; we recommended the use of the status400ForVariableCoercionErrors: true option to restore the intended behavior. That option now defaults to true.
• The unsafe precomputedNonce option to landing page plugins (which was only non-deprecated for 8 days) has been removed.

Patch Changes

There are a few other small changes in v5:

• #​8076 5b26558 Thanks @​valters! - Fix some error logs to properly call logger.error or logger.warn with this set. This fixes errors or crashes from logger implementations that expect this to be set properly in their methods.

• #​7515 100233a Thanks @​trevor-scheer! - ApolloServerPluginSubscriptionCallback now takes a fetcher argument, like the usage and schema reporting plugins. The default value is Node's built-in fetch.

• Updated dependencies [100233a]:

  • @​apollo/server-gateway-interface@​2.0.0

v4.13.0

Compare Source

Minor Changes

• #​8180 e9d49d1 Thanks @​github-actions! - ⚠️ SECURITY @apollo/server/standalone:

  The default configuration of startStandaloneServer was vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks through specially crafted request bodies with exotic character set encodings.

  In accordance with RFC 7159, we now only accept request bodies encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16 (LE or BE), or UTF-32 (LE or BE).
  Any other character set will be rejected with a 415 Unsupported Media Type error.
  Additionally, upstream libraries used by this version of Apollo Server may not support all of these encodings, so some requests may still fail even if they pass this check.

  If you were not using startStandaloneServer, you were not affected by this vulnerability.

  Generally, please note that we provide startStandaloneServer as a convenience tool for quickly getting started with Apollo Server.
  For production deployments, we recommend using Apollo Server with a more fully-featured web server framework such as Express, Koa, or Fastify, where you have more control over security-related configuration options.

  Also please note that Apollo Server 4.x is considered EOL as of January 26, 2026, and Apollo no longer commits to providing support or updates for it. Please prioritize migrating to Apollo Server 5.x for continued support and updates.

v4.12.2

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(No change; there is a change to the @apollo/server-integration-testsuite used to test integrations, and the two packages always have matching versions.)

v4.12.1

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Patch Changes

• #​8064 41f98d4 Thanks @​glasser! - Update README.md to recommend Express v5 integration now that Express v5 is released.

v4.12.0

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Minor Changes

• #​8054 89e3f84 Thanks @​clenfest! - Adds a new graphql-js validation rule to reject operations that recursively request selections above a specified maximum, which is disabled by default. Use configuration option maxRecursiveSelections=true to enable with a maximum of 10,000,000, or maxRecursiveSelections=<number> for a custom maximum. Enabling this validation can help avoid performance issues with configured validation rules or plugins.

Patch Changes

• #​8031 2550d9f Thanks @​slagiewka! - Add return after sending 400 response in doubly escaped JSON parser middleware

v4.11.3

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Patch Changes

• #​8010 f4228e8 Thanks @​glasser! - Compatibility with Next.js Turbopack. Fixes #​8004.

v4.11.2

Compare Source

(No change; there is a change to the @apollo/server-integration-testsuite used to test integrations, and the two packages always have matching versions.)

v4.11.1

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Patch Changes

• #​7952 bb81b2c Thanks @​glasser! - Upgrade dependencies so that automated scans don't detect a vulnerability.

  @apollo/server depends on express which depends on cookie. Versions of express older than v4.21.1 depend on a version of cookie vulnerable to CVE-2024-47764. Users of older express versions who call res.cookie() or res.clearCookie() may be vulnerable to this issue.

  However, Apollo Server does not call this function directly, and it does not expose any object to user code that allows TypeScript users to call this function without an unsafe cast.

  The only way that this direct dependency can cause a vulnerability for users of Apollo Server is if you call startStandaloneServer with a context function that calls Express-specific methods such as res.cookie() or res.clearCookies() on the response object, which is a violation of the TypeScript types provided by startStandaloneServer (which only promise that the response object is a core Node.js http.ServerResponse rather than the Express-specific subclass). So this vulnerability can only affect Apollo Server users who use unsafe JavaScript or unsafe as typecasts in TypeScript.

  However, this upgrade will at least prevent vulnerability scanners from alerting you to this dependency, and we encourage all Express users to upgrade their project's own express dependency to v4.21.1 or newer.

v4.11.0

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Minor Changes

• #​7916 4686454 Thanks @​andrewmcgivery! - Add hideSchemaDetailsFromClientErrors option to ApolloServer to allow hiding 'did you mean' suggestions from validation errors.

  Even with introspection disabled, it is possible to "fuzzy test" a graph manually or with automated tools to try to determine the shape of your schema. This is accomplished by taking advantage of the default behavior where a misspelt field in an operation
  will be met with a validation error that includes a helpful "did you mean" as part of the error text.

  For example, with this option set to true, an error would read Cannot query field "help" on type "Query". whereas with this option set to false it would read Cannot query field "help" on type "Query". Did you mean "hello"?.

  We recommend enabling this option in production to avoid leaking information about your schema to malicious actors.

  To enable, set this option to true in your ApolloServer options:

  const server = new ApolloServer({
    typeDefs,
    resolvers,
    hideSchemaDetailsFromClientErrors: true,
  });

v4.10.5

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Patch Changes

• #​7821 b2e15e7 Thanks @​renovate! - Non-major dependency updates

• #​7900 86d7111 Thanks @​trevor-scheer! - Inline a small dependency that was causing build issues for ESM projects

v4.10.4

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Patch Changes

• #​7871 18a3827 Thanks @​tninesling! - Subscription heartbeats are initialized prior to awaiting subscribe(). This allows long-running setup to happen in the returned Promise without the subscription being terminated prior to resolution.

v4.10.3

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Patch Changes

• #​7866 5f335a5 Thanks @​tninesling! - Catch errors thrown by subscription generators, and gracefully clean up the subscription instead of crashing.

v4.10.2

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Patch Changes

• #​7849 c7e514c Thanks @​TylerBloom! - In the subscription callback server plugin, terminating a subscription now immediately closes the internal async generator. This avoids that generator existing after termination and until the next message is received.

v4.10.1

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Patch Changes

• #​7843 72f568e Thanks @​bscherlein! - Improves timing of the willResolveField end hook on fields which return Promises resolving to Arrays. This makes the use of the setCacheHint method more reliable.

v4.10.0

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Minor Changes

• #​7786 869ec98 Thanks @​ganemone! - Restore missing v1 skipValidation option as dangerouslyDisableValidation. Note that enabling this option exposes your server to potential security and unexpected runtime issues. Apollo will not support issues that arise as a result of using this option.

• #​7803 e9a0d6e Thanks @​favna! - allow stringifyResult to return a Promise<string>

  Users who implemented the stringifyResult hook can now expect error responses to be formatted with the hook as well. Please take care when updating to this version to ensure this is the desired behavior, or implement the desired behavior accordingly in your stringifyResult hook. This was considered a non-breaking change as we consider that it was an oversight in the original PR that introduced stringifyResult hook.

Patch Changes

• #​7793 9bd7748 Thanks @​bnjjj! - General availability of subscription callback protocol

• #​7799 63dc50f Thanks @​stijnbe! - Fix type of ApolloServerPluginUsageReporting reportTimer

• #​7740 fe68c1b Thanks @​barnisanov! - Uninstalled body-parser and used express built-in body-parser functionality instead(mainly the json middleware)

v4.9.5

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Patch Changes

• #​7741 07585fe39 Thanks @​mayakoneval! - Pin major releases of embeddable Explorer & Sandbox code.

• #​7769 4fac1628c Thanks @​cwikla! - Change SchemaReporter.pollTimer from being a NodeJS.Timer to a NodeJS.Timeout

v4.9.4

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Patch Changes

• #​7747 ddce036e1 Thanks @​trevor-scheer! - The minimum version of graphql officially supported by Apollo Server 4 as a peer dependency, v16.6.0, contains a serious bug that can crash your Node server. This bug is fixed in the immediate next version, graphql@16.7.0, and we strongly encourage you to upgrade your installation of graphql to at least v16.7.0 to avoid this bug. (For backwards compatibility reasons, we cannot change Apollo Server 4's minimum peer dependency, but will change it when we release Apollo Server 5.)

  Apollo Server 4 contained a particular line of code that makes triggering this crashing bug much more likely. This line was already removed in Apollo Server v3.8.2 (see #​6398) but the fix was accidentally not included in Apollo Server 4. We are now including this change in Apollo Server 4, which will reduce the likelihood of hitting this crashing bug for users of graphql v16.6.0. That said, taking this @apollo/server upgrade does not prevent this bug from being triggered in other ways, and the real fix to this crashing bug is to upgrade graphql.

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