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OpenAdvisories
High · 7.5 CVE-2023-25151 EUVD-2023-0632GHSA-5r5m-65gx-7vrhGO-2023-1546

DoS vulnerability for high cardinality metrics in opentelemetry-go-contrib

Published Feb 8, 2023 · Updated Mar 10, 2025 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

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.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
open-telemetry opentelemetry-go-contrib >= 0.38.0, < 0.39.0 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 golang-opentelemetry-contrib No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS golang-opentelemetry-contrib No fix yet —
Ubuntu 25.10 golang-opentelemetry-contrib No fix yet —

Affected packages

References