CVE-2026-114603

## Summary `TraceState.from_header` splits the inbound W3C `tracestate` header with a regular expression that starts with an unbounded optional-whitespace run, and no length limit is applied first. A run of spaces or tabs that is not followed by a comma costs O(N²) CPU. A single unauthenticated request with a ~100 KB `tracestate` keeps the handling worker busy for ~6 s (spaces) to ~12 s (tabs); under an asyncio server it blocks every other connection for that time. ## Affected component / version - Package: `opentelemetry-api` (pip) — `opentelemetry/trace/span.py` (`TraceState.from_header`), reached from `opentelemetry/trace/propagation/tracecontext.py` (`TraceContextTextMapPropagator.extract`). - Confirmed in `main` (5e8083e8) and in the v1.44.0 and v1.45.0 tags; the same pattern is present back to v1.0.0 (introduced by #1599, March 2021). Not exhaustively verified against every release in between. - Reachable with the default propagators (`OTEL_PROPAGATORS` defaults to `tracecontext,baggage`) from any server instrumentation that calls `propagate.extract()`, for example `opentelemetry-instrumentation-asgi`. ## Details 1. The header reaches the parser without any length check: ```python # opentelemetry-api/src/opentelemetry/trace/propagation/tracecontext.py:57 tracestate_headers = getter.get(carrier, self._TRACESTATE_HEADER_NAME) # <-- attacker-controlled request header(s), any size if tracestate_headers is None: tracestate = None else: tracestate = TraceState.from_header(tracestate_headers) # <-- no length check before parsing (line 61) ``` 2. The split pattern and the parser: ```python # opentelemetry-api/src/opentelemetry/trace/span.py:45 _TRACECONTEXT_MAXIMUM_TRACESTATE_KEYS = 32 # <-- only enforced later, in TraceState.__init__, after the split _delimiter_pattern = re.compile(r"[ \t]*,[ \t]*") # <-- (line 46) starts with an unbounded [ \t]* # span.py:382 @classmethod def from_header(cls, header_list: list[str]) -> Trac