| Package | Affected versions | Patched versions |
|---|---|---|
| OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OpenTelemetryProtocol | ≥ 1.13.1, < 1.15.3 | 1.15.3 |
| opentelemetry | ≥ 1.13.1, < 1.15.3 | 1.15.3 |
When exporting telemetry over gRPC using the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), the exporter may parse a server-provided grpc-status-details-bin trailer during retry handling. Prior to the fix, a malformed trailer could encode an extremely large length-delimited protobuf field which was used directly for allocation, allowing excessive memory allocation and potential denial of service (DoS).
#5980 introduced a retry path that parses grpc-status-details-bin to extract gRPC retry delay information for retryable responses.
On that path:
OtlpGrpcExportClient captures grpc-status-details-bin from retryable status responses (ResourceExhausted / Unavailable).OtlpRetry invokes GrpcStatusDeserializer.TryGetGrpcRetryDelay using this untrusted trailer value.GrpcStatusDeserializer.DecodeBytes decoded a protobuf varint length and allocated new byte[length] without validating the bounds against the remaining payload size.A malicious or compromised collector (or a MitM in weakly-protected deployments) could return a crafted grpc-status-details-bin payload that forces oversized allocation and memory exhaustion in the instrumented process.
If an OTLP/gRPC endpoint is attacker-controlled (or traffic is intercepted), a crafted retryable response can trigger large allocations during trailer parsing, which may exhaust memory and cause process instability/crash (availability impact / DoS).
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.
None known.
#7064 updates GrpcStatusDeserializer to validate decoded length-delimited field sizes before allocation by ensuring the requested length is sane and does not exceed the remaining payload.
This causes malformed or truncated grpc-status-details-bin payloads to fail safely instead of attempting unbounded allocation.
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