Junglewise Threat Intelligence

CVE-2026-44967: OpenTelemetry-cpp memory exhaustion in OTLP HTTP exporters

CVE-2026-44967 · Severity: medium · CVSS 5.3 · Published 2026-06-12

Vendors: Opentelemetry.

Executive brief

OpenTelemetry-cpp is a library used by developers to monitor application performance by sending data to a central collector. A vulnerability in the library's communication component allows a malicious or compromised data collector to send an oversized response that crashes the monitored application. This could lead to service outages if the application is configured to send data to an untrusted endpoint or if a network attacker intercepts the connection.

Technical details

The OTLP HTTP exporters (traces, metrics, and logs) in OpenTelemetry-cpp prior to version 1.27.0 fail to enforce a size limit when reading HTTP response bodies. The library reads the full response into an in-memory byte vector, which is then copied into a string, leading to excessive memory allocation. An attacker who controls the collector endpoint or can perform a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack can provide a massive response body to trigger an Out-of-Memory (OOM) condition and crash the process. This is classified as CWE-789 (Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value). The issue is resolved in version 1.27.0 by implementing maximum size limits in the CURL-based HTTP client.

Affected products

  • OpenTelemetry opentelemetry-cpp < 1.27.0

Timeline

  • 2026-03-30: other: Issue first reported on GitHub
  • 2026-05-12: patched: Fix merged into main branch
  • 2026-05-18: advisory: GitHub Security Advisory published
  • 2026-06-12: disclosed: CVE published to NVD

References