What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-118259: opentelemetry-java: Quadratic CPU consumption in W3C tracestate parsing

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-10-28 · updated 2026-10-29
• Weakness: CWE-1333

Description

opentelemetry-java is the Java implementation of the OpenTelemetry API for recording telemetry, and SDK for managing telemetry recorded by the API. Prior to 1.67.0, W3CTraceContextPropagator.extract() uses regex delimiter processing that can exhibit quadratic backtracking while parsing tracestate headers containing long runs of spaces or tabs without a following comma. An unauthenticated attacker whose headers reach extraction can repeatedly block request or event-loop threads and cause excessive CPU consumption, with practical impact bounded by ingress header-size limits, proxy configuration, and threading. This issue is fixed in version 1.67.0.

Affected products

• open-telemetry opentelemetry-java: before 1.67.0

References

• https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java/commit/ba4dfea91647d1ef596975db5d7197681df3c0f5
• https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java/commit/cc4f5f22aed0d69369941cde8029e73507cf438f
• https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java/pull/8914
• https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java/releases/tag/v1.67.0
• https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java/security/advisories/GHSA-ccrj-gw8r-854m

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