VulnerabilityPublished 16 Sep 2026

CVE-2026-81872: open-telemetry opentelemetry-go · Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Affects open-telemetry opentelemetry-goSource CVE Database V5

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Not known to be exploited · CVSS 6.3 Medium : upgrade to 0.21.0 when convenient.

Data as of 31 Oct 2026, 08:20 UTC

CVSS 4.0 base score

6.3Medium

How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.

EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 32% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
Patch: Available – fixed in 0.21.0

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Attack Vector: Network
Attack Complexity: Low
Attack Requirements: Present
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: None
Vulnerable system confidentiality: None
Vulnerable system integrity: None
Vulnerable system availability: Low
Subsequent system confidentiality: None
Subsequent system integrity: None
Subsequent system availability: None

Bold values are the worst case: easiest to exploit or largest impact.

Attack Vector: Network: The vulnerable system is bound to the network stack and the set of possible attackers extends beyond the other options listed below, up to and including the entire Internet. Such a vulnerability is often termed “remotely exploitable” and can be thought of as an attack being exploitable at the protocol level one or more network hops away (e.g., across one or more routers).
Attack Complexity: Low: The attacker must take no measurable action to exploit the vulnerability. The attack requires no target-specific circumvention to exploit the vulnerability. An attacker can expect repeatable success against the vulnerable system.
Attack Requirements: Present: The successful attack depends on the presence of specific deployment and execution conditions of the vulnerable system that enable the attack. These include: a race condition must be won to successfully exploit the vulnerability (the successfulness of the attack is conditioned on execution conditions that are not under full control of the attacker, or the attack may need to be launched multiple times against a single target before being successful); the attacker must inject themselves into the logical network path between the target and the resource requested by the victim (e.g. vulnerabilities requiring an on-path attacker).
Privileges Required: None: The attacker is unauthorized prior to attack, and therefore does not require any access to settings or files of the vulnerable system to carry out an attack.
User Interaction: None: The vulnerable system can be exploited without interaction from any human user, other than the attacker.
Vulnerable system confidentiality: None: There is no loss of confidentiality within the Vulnerable System.
Vulnerable system integrity: None: There is no loss of integrity within the Vulnerable System.
Vulnerable system availability: Low: Performance is reduced or there are interruptions in resource availability. Even if repeated exploitation of the vulnerability is possible, the attacker does not have the ability to completely deny service to legitimate users. The resources in the Vulnerable System are either partially available all of the time, or fully available only some of the time, but overall there is no direct, serious consequence to the Vulnerable System.
Subsequent system confidentiality: None: There is no loss of confidentiality within the Subsequent System or all confidentiality impact is constrained to the Vulnerable System.
Subsequent system integrity: None: There is no loss of integrity within the Subsequent System or all integrity impact is constrained to the Vulnerable System.
Subsequent system availability: None: There is no impact to availability within the Subsequent System or all availability impact is constrained to the Vulnerable System.

Definitions: FIRST CVSS v4.0 specification.

Exploitation evidence

Disclosed: evidence found.
CVE published 16 Sep 2026
Detectable: no evidence on record.
No public nuclei template indexed
Weaponized: no evidence on record.
No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB
Exploited in the wildExploited: no evidence on record.
Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation
Observed by OffSeq MirageSeen by Mirage: no evidence on record.
No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 30 Oct 2026.

Disclosed: The CVE record is public on cve.org. Its publication is t = 0.
Detectable: A public nuclei template can find exposed instances, for defenders and attackers alike.
Weaponized: A Metasploit exploit module or Exploit-DB entry exists (Metasploit scanner modules do not count), or CISA SSVC or the CVSS exploit maturity reports a public proof of concept.
Exploited in the wild: CISA KEV lists it, CISA SSVC rates exploitation active, or a source reports attacks.
Observed by OffSeq Mirage: OffSeq Mirage honeypot sensors recorded attack traffic for this CVE, or found exposed hosts without attack traffic.

Moments are spaced evenly, not to scale; a dashed line marks a gap of six months or more. Deltas count from t = 0. Sources that give only a date (CISA KEV, Exploit-DB, or a time of exactly 00:00Z) read “same day” rather than hours. Metasploit modules carry the flaw’s disclosure date, not their release date, and nuclei templates carry no date, so both appear above but not on the timeline.

What to do

Upgrade opentelemetry-go and github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/sdk/log to 0.21.0.

Affected software

Product	Affected	Fixed in
open-telemetryopentelemetry-go	Affected <0.21.0	Fixed in 0.21.0
Gogithub.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/sdk/log`pkg:golang/github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/sdk/log`Other threats	Affected <0.21.0	Fixed in 0.21.0

Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.

AI-suggested

If you cannot patch yet, users should consider mitigating the risk by avoiding configurations that allow sustained high-volume log emission when the exporter or downstream collector is slow or blocked. Monitoring exporter health and applying backpressure controls may help reduce the risk of CPU exhaustion.

Description

CVE-2026-81872 is a medium severity availability vulnerability in the open-telemetry opentelemetry-go SDK. The BatchingProcessor in sdk/log can enter a tight CPU loop when the asynchronous export buffer is full and the exporter is backpressured. This causes repeated immediate export retries, leading to CPU exhaustion and denial of service in the affected application. The issue affects versions prior to 0.21.0.

Impact

The vulnerability causes uncontrolled CPU consumption in the affected process, resulting in denial of service or degraded availability of the application embedding the opentelemetry-go SDK. The impact is limited to the local application process and does not affect other systems or the broader environment. There is no indication of data compromise or privilege escalation.

Summary

The vulnerability exists in the BatchingProcessor component of the open-telemetry opentelemetry-go SDK's logging subsystem. When the asynchronous export buffer becomes full due to exporter backpressure, the BatchingProcessor's poll loop continuously retries exports without waiting, causing a busy-spin CPU loop. This happens because the bufferExporter.EnqueueExport method is non-blocking and returns false when the channel is full, preventing the queue length from decreasing. Consequently, the poll goroutine repeatedly triggers itself, leading to uncontrolled CPU consumption. A proof-of-concept demonstrates this behavior by configuring a blocking exporter and emitting high-volume logs, resulting in CPU exhaustion.

CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (opens in a new tab)
Class weaknessLikelihood of exploit: High
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
MITRE discourages mapping vulnerabilities to this broad entry; the root cause is usually a more specific weakness.
Architecture and Design
Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place.
Architecture and Design
Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or; uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed.
Architecture and Design
Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
OWASP Cheat Sheets
File Upload (opens in a new tab)
OWASP ASVS 4.0.3
V12.1.1 (opens in a new tab)
Attack patterns
XML Ping of the Death (opens in a new tab)
Regular Expression Exponential Blowup (opens in a new tab)
Sustained Client Engagement (opens in a new tab)
From MITRE CWE, MITRE CAPEC and OWASP (Top 10, OpenCRE).
CWE-834Excessive Iteration (opens in a new tab)
Class weakness
The product performs an iteration or loop without sufficiently limiting the number of times that the loop is executed.
MITRE discourages mapping vulnerabilities to this broad entry; the root cause is usually a more specific weakness.

References

Community reviews

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Exploitation evidence

What to do

Affected software

Description

AI analysisMachine-generated, updated 17 Oct 2026, 23:33 UTC

WeaknessesCWE-400, CWE-834

Technical details

References

Community reviews

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