What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2023-47108: DoS vulnerability in otelgrpc (uncontrolled resource consumption) due to unbound cardinality metrics
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 2.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2023-11-10 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-770
Description
OpenTelemetry-Go Contrib is a collection of third-party packages for OpenTelemetry-Go. Starting in version 0.37.0 and prior to version 0.46.0, the grpc Unary Server Interceptor out of the box adds labels `net.peer.sock.addr` and `net.peer.sock.port` that have unbound cardinality. It leads to the server's potential memory exhaustion when many malicious requests are sent. An attacker can easily flood the peer address and port for requests. Version 0.46.0 contains a fix for this issue. As a workaround to stop being affected, a view removing the attributes can be used. The other possibility is to disable grpc metrics instrumentation by passing `otelgrpc.WithMeterProvider` option with `noop.NewMeterProvider`.
Affected products
- open-telemetry opentelemetry-go: before 0.46.0 — fixed in 0.46.0
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: open-telemetry opentelemetry-go 0.46.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/blob/9d4eb7e7706038b07d33f83f76afbe13f53d171d/instrumentation/google.golang.org/grpc/otelgrpc/interceptor.go#L327
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/blob/instrumentation/google.golang.org/grpc/otelgrpc/v0.45.0/instrumentation/google.golang.org/grpc/otelgrpc/config.go#L138
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/commit/04c5dcbb5b35f14b4e6793b245919c72addbc7d0
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/commit/b44dfc9092b157625a5815cb437583cee663333b
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/pull/4322
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/security/advisories/GHSA-8pgv-569h-w5rw
- https://pkg.go.dev/go.opentelemetry.io/otel/metric/noop#NewMeterProvider
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/blob/9d4eb7e7706038b07d33f83f76afbe13f53d171d/instrumentation/google.golang.org/grpc/otelgrpc/interceptor.go#L327
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/blob/instrumentation/google.golang.org/grpc/otelgrpc/v0.45.0/instrumentation/google.golang.org/grpc/otelgrpc/config.go#L138
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/commit/b44dfc9092b157625a5815cb437583cee663333b
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/pull/4322
- https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/security/advisories/GHSA-8pgv-569h-w5rw
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