{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/graphqler-enhancing-graphql-security-with","title":"GraphQLer: Enhancing GraphQL Security with Context-Aware API Testing","arxiv_id":"2504.13358","date":"2025-04-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Omar Tsai","Jianing Li","Tsz Tung Cheung","Lejing Huang","Hao Zhu","Jianrui Xiao","Iman Sharafaldin","Mohammad A. Tayebi"],"abstract":"GraphQL APIs power production systems across financial services, e-commerce, and social platforms, yet their most critical access-control vulnerabilities--Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR), Use-After-Free (UAF), and state-dependent injection--routinely escape automated security testing. Industry-standard scanners (ZAP) and the leading research fuzzer (EvoMaster) test operations in isolation and cannot compose the multi-step sequences these flaws require. We present GraphQLer, an open-source automated security testing framework built for production GraphQL APIs. GraphQLer constructs a typed dependency graph from live schema introspection and synthesizes vulnerability chains--ordered operation sequences targeting specific flaw classes. Three strategies cover the critical attack surface: topological SCC-traversal for general reachability, cross-user IDOR replay for broken access control, and CREATE -> DELETE -> READ synthesis for UAF. On a production financial API (FinServ), GraphQLer identified eight potential vulnerabilities--including denial-of-service vectors that exposed stack traces and sensitive implementation details--without prior documentation or authentication credentials. On a self-hosted Saleor instance pinned to the CVE-2022-39275 commit, GraphQLer reproduced all four broken-access-control mutations cited in the security advisory. On the 11 public APIs of the coverage set, GraphQLer achieves 85.52% mean PositiveCoverage versus 29.29% (EvoMaster) and 21.80% (ZAP); across the 21 evaluated APIs it detects all 5 confirmed IDOR endpoints, UAF behavior on two controlled schemas, and confirms XSS and SQLi on DVGA (an independent third-party oracle)--while all baselines detect zero chain-based vulnerabilities.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13358v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13358v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"graphqler-enhancing-graphql-security-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/omar2535/GraphQLer","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}