GHSA-88hf-wf7h-7w4m is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in OpenTelemetry.Exporter.Zipkin. A fix is available for OpenTelemetry.Exporter.Zipkin — see the affected versions and patch details below.
OpenTelemetry's Zipkin remote endpoint cache could grow without bounds and increase memory pressure
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 GHSA-88hf-wf7h-7w4m.
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
GHSA-88hf-wf7h-7w4m 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 377,166 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.ZipkinReal-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
The Zipkin exporter remote endpoint cache accepted unbounded key growth derived from span attributes. In high-cardinality scenarios, this could increase process memory usage over time and degrade availability.
Details
- Introduce a bounded, thread-safe LRU cache for remote endpoints.
- Enforce fixed maximum size to prevent unbounded growth.
Impact
- A process using Zipkin export for client/producer spans could experience avoidable memory growth under sustained unique remote endpoint values.
Resources
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| .NETNuGet | OpenTelemetry.Exporter.Zipkin | all versions | 1.15.3dotnet add package OpenTelemetry.Exporter.Zipkin --version 1.15.3 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for OpenTelemetry.Exporter.Zipkin, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update OpenTelemetry.Exporter.Zipkin to 1.15.3 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-88hf-wf7h-7w4m 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 GHSA-88hf-wf7h-7w4m can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-88hf-wf7h-7w4m. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-88hf-wf7h-7w4m in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-88hf-wf7h-7w4m across NuGet dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.