CVE-2024-42368: open-telemetry opentelemetry-collector-contrib Observable Timing Discrepancy

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2024-42368 is a medium (CVSS 6.5) Observable Timing Discrepancy vulnerability in open-telemetry opentelemetry-collector-contrib. EPSS estimates a 0.62% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 48.7% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 13-08-2024
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 14-08-2024
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

OpenTelemetry, also known as OTel, is a vendor-neutral open source Observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. The bearertokenauth extension's server authenticator performs a simple, non-constant time string comparison of the received & configured bearer tokens. This impacts anyone using the `bearertokenauth` server authenticator. Malicious clients with network access to the collector may perform a timing attack against a collector with this authenticator to guess the configured token, by iteratively sending tokens and comparing the response time. This would allow an attacker to introduce fabricated or bad data into the collector's telemetry pipeline. The observable timing vulnerability was fixed by using constant-time comparison in 0.107.0

• CWE-208Observable Timing DiscrepancyTwo separate operations in a product require different amounts of time to complete, in a way that is observable to an actor and reveals security-relevant information about the state of the product, such as whether a particular operation was successful or not.