CVE-2023-39951: Instrumentation for AWS SDK v2 captures email content when using Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) v1 API, exposing that content to the telemetry backend

Overview

The Amazon Distribution for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) team identified an issue related to the instrumentation of Java applications using the AWS SDK v2 with Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) v1 API. When SES POST requests are instrumented, the query parameters of the request are inserted into the trace url.path field. This behavior leads to the http body, containing the email subject and message, to be present in the trace request url metadata. The ADOT team submitted a fix that is included in version 1.28.0 [1]

[1] #8931

Scope of Impact

Any user using a version before 1.28.0 of OpenTelemetry Java Instrumentation to instrument AWS SDK v2 call to SES’s v1 SendEmail API is affected. The e-mail content sent to SES may end up in telemetry backend. This exposes the e-mail content to unintended audiences.

Proof-of-concept

A GitHub user opened an issue [2].

[2] #8956

Proof-of-concept Mitigation

The issue can be mitigated by updating OpenTelemetry Java Instrumentation to version 1.28.0 or later.