CVE-2023-43810 — opentelemetry-instrumenta…
HIGHFix: open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python-contrib@6007e0cCVE-2023-43810 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in opentelemetry-instrumentation. A fix is available for opentelemetry-instrumentation — see the affected versions and patch details below.
opentelemetry-instrumentation Denial of Service vulnerability due to unbound cardinality metrics
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2023-43810.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-43810 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,333 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
opentelemetry-instrumentationReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
OpenTelemetry, also known as OTel for short, is a vendor-neutral open-source Observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data such as traces, metrics, logs. Autoinstrumentation out of the box adds the label http_method that has unbound cardinality. It leads to the server's potential memory exhaustion when many malicious requests are sent. HTTP method for requests can be easily set by an attacker to be random and long. In order to be affected program has to be instrumented for HTTP handlers and does not filter any unknown HTTP methods on the level of CDN, LB, previous middleware, etc. This issue has been patched in version 0.41b0.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | opentelemetry-instrumentation | all versions | 0.41b0pip install --upgrade 'opentelemetry-instrumentation==0.41b0' |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for opentelemetry-instrumentation, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update opentelemetry-instrumentation to 0.41b0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-43810 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2023-43810 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2023-43810. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-43810 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2023-43810 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.