GHSA-q834-8qmm-v933 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) vulnerability in OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocol. O3 Security confirms whether GHSA-q834-8qmm-v933 is actually reachable in your code before you act, and blocks exploitation at runtime until you patch.
OpenTelemetry dotnet: OTLP exporter reads unbounded HTTP response bodies
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 | 1.15.2 |
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. 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 OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocol to 1.15.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-q834-8qmm-v933 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 GHSA-q834-8qmm-v933 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 GHSA-q834-8qmm-v933. 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-q834-8qmm-v933 in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-q834-8qmm-v933 across NuGet dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.