Secure your GraphQL Microservices

Federation unlocks superpowers for our queries, enabling us to split up business logic and improve performance with features like @defer. However, these same powers can be abused if placed in the wrong hands, so it’s essential to limit who has access to them.

The threats

Many coordination features of a federated graph rely on an important assumption: clients always query your router—never individual subgraphs. If this assumption is violated and clients query your subgraphs directly, you might expose data and capabilities that you shouldn’t:

• The @inaccessible directive enables subgraphs to define schema fields that other subgraphs might need, but that the router shouldn’t expose to clients. If clients can query a subgraph directly, those queries can include @inaccessible fields. And even if you don’t have any sensitive  @inaccessible fields in your graph today, you might in the future!
• The @requires directive enables a subgraph to define schema fields that depend on entity fields from other subgraphs. Subgraphs rely on the router to resolve this dependency, ensuring that trusted data is provided. But if clients have direct access to subgraph entity resolvers, that data can no longer be trusted.
• The @override directive enables a subgraph to take responsibility for a schema field away from another subgraph. With direct subgraph access, clients can still query the original subgraph field, which can result in inconsistent and unexpected behavior.

This is just a small selection of the available features today, and more will be added over time. The key takeaway is that federation is a microservice architecture that expects a single entry point through a controlled router. If subgraphs can be accessed directly, it’s only a matter of time before something unexpected happens, and that unexpected event could be a security breach.

Protecting your subgraphs

Exposing subgraphs publicly opens the door to several attacks. To mitigate them, we prevent anything but our routers from accessing our subgraphs. First, we can protect our subgraphs at the application level by adding an extra layer of authorization on top of whatever user auth may be in place. We can configure our routers to send a header containing a shared secret to each of our subgraphs:

headers:
  subgraphs:
    orders:
      request:
        - insert:
          name: "Router-Authorization"
          value: "${env.ORDERS_SUBGRAPH_SECRET}"
    users:
      request:
        - insert:
          name: "Router-Authorization"
          value: "${env.USERS_SUBGRAPH_SECRET}"

Notice that we use a unique secret per subgraph, following a security best practice called “the principle of least privilege”. If there’s no reason for the orders subgraph to have direct access to the users subgraph, then we should not give it the ability to do so (by sending it valid tokens for another subgraph).

These values come from environment variables, so how you set them will depend on where you’re running your routers. Most secret managers have a way to inject values via an environment variable. For example, in GraphOS, you can set secrets via the UI.

How this looks on the subgraph side depends on your implementation. Here’s an example using FastAPI in Python:

@app.middleware("http")
async def check_router_security(
    request: Request, call_next: Callable[[Request], Awaitable[Response]]
) -> Response:
    router_secret = environ.get("ROUTER_SECRET")
    if router_secret is None:
        return await call_next(request)
    if request.headers.get("Router-Authorization") != router_secret:
        return Response(status_code=HTTPStatus.UNAUTHORIZED)
    return await call_next(request)

Here, we’re setting up the expected token as an environment variable called ROUTER_SECRET in our subgraph. This value would be injected via the secret manager for your hosting platform. If the secret is not set (such as in local development), we turn off this enforcement; you may want to add a more sophisticated method of ensuring this is never turned off in production. If the secret is set, we ensure every request has a matching Router-Authorization header. Requests without a valid header will get a bare response with a 401 Unauthorized code—we don’t send any additional information that clients don’t need, and unauthenticated requesters don’t even need to know that this is a GraphQL server.

We have examples for many languages and frameworks in our subgraph templates, so check them out for more inspiration!

Extra credit: network protections

As an additional step, depending on your hosting environment, you may be able to use network-level protections to prevent any incoming connections to your subgraphs except your routers. This is typically done via firewall rules (such as access control lists). Not all platforms or architectures will have this option, but if you do, we recommend adding it as a “defense in depth”. 

Ruling out alternatives

There are a few other solutions to this problem that might seem viable but can cause issues. Let’s go over them!

First, you might be tempted to apply router authorization checks only for federation-specific subgraph fields (_service and _entities ), but there are problems with this approach:

• Newer versions of federation might add more subgraph fields in the future, which would introduce new vulnerabilities that special-case checks don’t handle.
• This approach doesn’t solve the problem of reaching @inaccessible or @requries fields via a top-level Query field (a standard, non-federated query).

Second, you might be tempted to enforce router authorization per field, maybe even automatically for any field that implements a federated directive. However, federation enables any single subgraph to influence the behavior of the entire supergraph. For example, if @inaccessible is applied to a field in any subgraph, it’s expected to be enforced on every subgraph. This means that per-field, per-subgraph enforcement is fundamentally inconsistent and can lead to unexpected data leakage.

Finally, you might consider disabling introspection as a solution—if attackers can’t discover the hidden fields, they can’t use them, right? This is called “security by obscurity” and is widely considered not security at all. A sufficiently determined attacker will eventually guess the names of fields that you don’t want them to find.

The only consistent approach to preventing undesired access to subgraph capabilities is to disable access to subgraphs entirely to any client besides the router.

Get secure

Now that you know the dangers of exposing subgraphs publicly and the best approach to mitigating the threat, there’s nothing left to do but start implementing! Start securing your subgraphs immediately.

Have any questions, comments, or concerns about this post? I’d love to hear about it in our Discord server! That’s also where you’ll be notified of upcoming security-related live streams.

Written by

Dylan Anthony

Read more by Dylan Anthony