Denial-of-Service Vulnerability in OpenTelemetry-Go v0.38.0

CVE-2023-25151 · HIGH Severity

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

opentelemetry-go-contrib is a collection of extensions for OpenTelemetry-Go. The v0.38.0 release of `go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/instrumentation/net/http/otelhttp` uses the `httpconv.ServerRequest` function to annotate metric measurements for the `http.server.request_content_length`, `http.server.response_content_length`, and `http.server.duration` instruments. The `ServerRequest` function sets the `http.target` attribute value to be the whole request URI (including the query string)[^1]. The metric instruments do not "forget" previous measurement attributes when `cumulative` temporality is used, this means the cardinality of the measurements allocated is directly correlated with the unique URIs handled. If the query string is constantly random, this will result in a constant increase in memory allocation that can be used in a denial-of-service attack. This issue has been addressed in version 0.39.0. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this issue.

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