CVE-2026-40182 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) CWE-789 vulnerability in OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocol. A fix is available for OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocol — see the affected versions and patch details below.
OpenTelemetry dotnet: OTLP exporter reads unbounded HTTP response bodies
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- 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-2026-40182.
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-2026-40182 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 377,636 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.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocolReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects NuGet packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Summary
When exporting telemetry to a back-end/collector over gRPC or HTTP using OpenTelemetry Protocol format (OTLP), if the request results in a unsuccessful request (i.e. HTTP 4xx or 5xx), the response is read into memory with no upper-bound on the number of bytes consumed.
This could cause memory exhaustion in the consuming application if the configured back-end/collector endpoint is attacker-controlled (or a network attacker can MitM the connection) and an extremely large body is returned by the response.
Details
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet/pull/6564 introduced a change to read the response body when a non-200 HTTP status code is received when exporting telemetry to aid debugging by operators so that the error response is included in the logs emitted by the exporter for both gRPC and HTTP/protobuf.
An unintended consequence of this change is that the response body is fully read into memory when received with no upper-bound.
This vulnerability was surfaced during the investigation of GHSA-w8rr-5gcm-pp58.
Impact
If an application using the OTLP exporter is configured to use a back-end/collector endpoint that is attacker-controlled (or a network attacker can MitM the connection) and an extremely large body is returned by the response the application could have its memory exhausted and create a denial-of-service condition.
Mitigation
The application's configured back-end/collector endpoint needs to behave maliciously. If the collector/back-end is a well-behaved implementation response bodies should not be excessively large if a request error occurs.
Workarounds
None known.
Remediation
#7017 updates the OTLP exporter for both gRPC and HTTP to:
- Limit the number of bytes read from the response body in an error condition to 4MiB (see https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/pull/781);
- Only attempt to read the response body if OpenTelemetry error logging is enabled.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| .NETNuGet | OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocol | ≥ 1.13.1&&< 1.15.2 | 1.15.2dotnet add package OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocol --version 1.15.2 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocol, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocol to 1.15.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-40182 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-2026-40182 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2026-40182. 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-2026-40182 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2026-40182 across NuGet dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.