Resource exhaustion in Open-Telemetry Opentelemetry-Go

CVE-2026-81872

OpenTelemetry-Go is the Go implementation of OpenTelemetry. Prior to version 0.21.0, the go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/log BatchingProcessor can enter a tight CPU loop when attacker-driven log emission fills its asynchronous export buffer while the exporter is backpressured. NewBatchingProcessor wraps the exporter with newBufferExporter(exporter, 1), and the poll loop calls queue.TryDequeue and bufferExporter.EnqueueExport before immediately signaling pollTrigger whenever the queue remains at or above batchSize. Because a failed nonblocking EnqueueExport leaves the queue length unchanged, the processor repeatedly retries without waiting for its ticker, exhausting CPU and degrading or denying service in the embedding process. This issue is fixed in version 0.21.0.

Vulnerability class: DoS (Denial of Service)

Published 2026-09-16 · last modified 2026-09-30.