CVE-2026-81871: medium-severity vulnerability in open-telemetry opentelemetry-go
OpenTelemetry-Go: Log gRPC exporter ignores env TLS certs, bypassing mTLS/pinning
Published · Updated
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13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 6.3epss 0.2%
OpenTelemetry-Go is the Go implementation of OpenTelemetry. Prior to version 0.21.0, the exporters/otlp/otlplog/otlploggrpc package loads OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_LOGS_CERTIFICATE, OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_CERTIFICATE, and related client certificate environment variables through loadEnvTLS into cfg.tlsCfg, but newGRPCDialOptions does not apply cfg.tlsCfg when creating gRPC transport credentials. The environment-only TLS path instead uses credentials.NewTLS with system roots and no configured client certificate, bypassing intended private CA pinning and mutual TLS unless the application also supplies WithTLSCredentials. A network attacker able to intercept or spoof the collector connection with a system-trusted certificate can read or alter log telemetry. This issue is fixed in version 0.21.0.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected products
open-telemetry · opentelemetry-goRelated CVEs — open-telemetry opentelemetry-go
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2026-29181HIGHOpenTelemetry-Go multi-value `baggage` header extraction causes excessive allocations (remote dos amplification)EPSS 0.8%CVE-2026-81872MEDIUMOpenTelemetry-Go: BatchProcessor can busy-spin when export buffer is fullEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-81870LOWOpenTelemetry-Go: Exporter config logging may leak endpoint URLs in info logsEPSS 0.3%CVE-2026-39883HIGHOpenTelemetry-Go has an incomplete fix for CVE-2026-24051: BSD kenv command not using absolute path enables PATH hijackingEPSS 0.3%CVE-2026-39882MEDIUMOpenTelemetry-Go OTLP HTTP exporters read unbounded HTTP response bodiesEPSS 0.2%CVE-2026-81869MEDIUMOpenTelemetry-Go: UTF-8 replacement rune bypasses attribute length truncationEPSS 0.2%
References
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/commit/c65d435b43e5e6b82310e6b18dd4cdcb8ac63a0chttps://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/releases/tag/exporters/otlp/otlplog/otlploggrpc/v0.21.0https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/security/advisories/GHSA-w34q-cm8f-9c5x