CVE-2024-42368
MEDIUMCVE-2024-42368 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) CWE-208 vulnerability in github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/extension/bearertokenauthextension. O3 Security confirms whether CVE-2024-42368 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
open-telemetry has an Observable Timing Discrepancy
Blast Radius
github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/extension/bearertokenauthextensionReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Go packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
OpenTelemetry, also known as OTel, is a vendor-neutral open source Observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. The bearertokenauth extension's server authenticator performs a simple, non-constant time string comparison of the received & configured bearer tokens. This impacts anyone using the bearertokenauth server authenticator. Malicious clients with network access to the collector may perform a timing attack against a collector with this authenticator to guess the configured token, by iteratively sending tokens and comparing the response time. This would allow an attacker to introduce fabricated or bad data into the collector's telemetry pipeline. The observable timing vulnerability was fixed by using constant-time comparison in 0.107.0
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/extension/bearertokenauthextension | ≥ 0.80.0&&< 0.107.0 | 0.107.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/extension/bearertokenauthextension. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
Fix
Update github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/extension/bearertokenauthextension to 0.107.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2024-42368 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 pinpoints whether CVE-2024-42368 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to CVE-2024-42368. 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-2024-42368 in your dependencies?
O3 detects CVE-2024-42368 across Go dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.