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CVE-2026-12243

Path Traversal via Percent-Encoding in nltk.data.find() and nltk.data.load()

CVSS 7.5 HIGHEPSS 0.5%CWE-22
Vexday Risk Score
21Low
SSVC decision (CISA)
Track
No exploitation signal → monitor
CVSS 7.5EPSS 0.5%KEV nãoPoC Nuclei Metasploit Patch
Lifecycle
30 Jun 2026Published on NVD
Recommendation: Monitor — no exploitation signal at the moment.
NLTK version 3.9.4 is vulnerable to a path traversal attack due to an incomplete fix for GitHub Issue #3504. The `_UNSAFE_NO_PROTOCOL_RE` regex in `nltk/data.py` checks for literal `../` sequences but fails to account for percent-encoded traversal sequences such as `..%2f`. The `url2pathname()` function decodes these sequences after the validation step, allowing an attacker to bypass the protection. This vulnerability enables an attacker to read arbitrary files accessible to the Python process by controlling the resource name parameter passed to `nltk.data.load()` or `nltk.data.find()`. The issue affects applications that rely on NLTK for resource loading, including NLP web applications, Jupyter notebooks, and CLI tools. The default `pathsec.ENFORCE=False` setting exacerbates the impact by not blocking the file read at the `open()` stage.
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
Affected products
nltk · nltk/nltk