CVE-2026-35413

This vulnerability presents moderate real-world risk despite the low CVSS score of 5.3. The CVSS vector (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N) correctly identifies network-accessible, low-complexity unauthenticated access with limited confidentiality impact. However, the practical risk is contextual: administrators who explicitly set GRAPHQL_INTROSPECTION=false are relying on this control for security or governance reasons-likely to prevent schema discovery by unauthorized parties. The bypass negates that control entirely, making the actual impact higher than the CVSS score reflects. There is no indication of active exploitation (KEV status not provided), public exploit code availability, or EPSS data. The vulnerability requires no authentication to trigger, making it trivial for any network-adjacent attacker to discover. The impact is purely informational (schema structure exposure), not enabling direct data exfiltration or system compromise, but schema information can enable further reconnaissance for secondary attacks.

An attacker can send an unauthenticated HTTP request to the /graphql/system endpoint of any publicly accessible Directus instance to retrieve the full GraphQL schema in SDL format. This reveals all collection names, field types, relationships, and permission structures without requiring credentials or triggering any authentication prompts. The attacker can then use this schema information to identify logical collections, discover potentially sensitive data fields, or map relationships to plan a more targeted attack against the CMS, such as crafted GraphQL queries targeting specific collections or fields.