Executive brief
Datadog's dd-trace library for Node.js, which is used to monitor application performance, contains a vulnerability that can be used to crash services. An attacker can send specially crafted web requests with excessively large headers that the library fails to limit. This results in the application consuming all available memory and processor power, leading to a service outage.
Technical details
A resource exhaustion vulnerability exists in dd-trace-js prior to version 5.100.0. The W3C baggage propagation logic in `packages/dd-trace/src/baggage.js` and `packages/dd-trace/src/opentracing/propagation/text_map.js` parses incoming HTTP headers without enforcing the `DD_TRACE_BAGGAGE_MAX_ITEMS` or `DD_TRACE_BAGGAGE_MAX_BYTES` limits during the extraction phase. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can provide a baggage header with an arbitrarily large number of key-value pairs or extremely large values. This causes unbounded CPU and memory consumption, leading to a Denial of Service (DoS). The issue is resolved in version 5.100.0 by mirroring the injection-side caps during extraction.
Affected products
- DataDog dd-trace-js < 5.100.0
Timeline
- 2026-05-04: patched: Fix merged in PR #8255 and released in v5.100.0
- 2026-07-17: disclosed: CVE-2026-50272 published