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Vulnerability · Published Jan 19, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2026-23886Swift W3C TraceContext has malformed HTTP header that can cause a crash

Medium 5.3

In plain English

A medium-severity improper input validation in swift-w3c-trace-context from swift-otel. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.5% (higher than 40% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)5.3Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.5%top 59.5% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Swift W3C TraceContext is a Swift implementation of the W3C Trace Context standard, and Swift OTel is an OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) backend for Swift Log, Swift Metrics, and Swift Distributed Tracing. Prior to Swift W3C TraceContext version 1.0.0-beta.5 and Swift OTel version 1.0.4, a denial-of-service vulnerability due to improper input validation allows a remote attacker to crash the service via a malformed HTTP header. This allows crashing the process with data coming from the network when used with, for example, an HTTP server. Most common way of using Swift W3C Trace Context is through Swift OTel. Version 1.0.0-beta.5 of Swift W3C TraceContext and version 1.0.4 of Swift OTel contain a patch for this issue. As a workaround, disable either Swift OTel or the code that extracts the trace information from an incoming header (such as a `TracingMiddleware`).

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
swift-otel swift-w3c-trace-context swift-otel < 1.0.4swift-w3c-trace-context < 1.0.0-beta.5

Weakness: CWE-20 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

References