🛡️ CVE-2024-42368 — bearertokenauthextension

🟡 CVSS 6.5 — Medium ✅ No Known Exploit CWE-208 NVD
6.5
CVSS Score
0 Low4 Medium7 High9 Critical10

Description

open-telemetry has an Observable Timing Discrepancy

Summary

The bearertokenauth extension's server authenticator performs a simple, non-constant time string comparison of the received & configured bearer tokens.

Details

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/blob/9128a9258fe1fee36f198f97b1e3371fc7b77a93/extension/bearertokenauthextension/bearertokenauth.go#L189-L196

For background on the type of vulnerability, see https://ropesec.com/articles/timing-attacks/.

Impact

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.

Fix

The observable timing vulnerability was fixed by @axw in v0.107.0 (PR https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/pull/34516) by using constant-time comparison.

Workarounds

  • upgrade to v0.107.0 or above, or, if you're unable to upgrade at this time,
  • don't expose the receiver using bearertokenauth to network segments accessible by potential attackers, or
  • change the receiver to use a different authentication extension instead, or
  • disable the receiver relying on bearertokenauth

How this vulnerability can be exploited

This issue can be reached over the network, attack complexity is low, an attacker needs no privileges on the target. No user interaction is required. The scope is unchanged, so the impact stays within the vulnerable component. Rated impact: confidentiality none, integrity low, availability low.

Affected software

CVE-2024-42368 is recorded against 2 packages.

  • github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/extension/bearertokenauthextension
  • unknown

Timeline and source

Published on 13 August 2024 and last revised on 4 February 2026. No public exploit is currently recorded for this entry. Record sourced from NVD.

References

github.com (Web)
nvd.nist.gov (Advisory)
github.com (Web)
github.com (Web)
github.com (Package)

Details

Severity Medium
CVSS Score 6.5
CVSS Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:L
CWE CWE-208
Public Exploit ✅ No
Source NVD
Published 2024-08-13
Updated 2026-08-12
Modified 2026-02-04
Fix URL N/A

Affected Packages

Software From version Fixed in
github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/extension/bearertokenauthextension — —
unknown — —

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