CVE-2026-12261: medium-severity vulnerability in nltk/nltk
Improper Access Control in nltk/nltk
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 5.3epss 0.2%
A vulnerability in `nltk.downloader` in nltk/nltk versions <= 3.9.4 allows for cross-package resource and model poisoning. The downloader extracts package archives into shared namespaces such as `corpora/` and `taggers/` instead of package-isolated roots, and validates package integrity only after the archive has been written and extracted. This design flaw enables one package to overwrite another package's trusted resources within the same namespace, making the changes immediately active through ordinary NLTK APIs. This issue persists across fresh interpreter restarts and can affect downstream workflows, including machine learning pipelines and reproducibility-sensitive environments.
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Affected products
nltk · nltk/nltkRelated CVEs — nltk/nltk
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2021-3828HIGHInefficient Regular Expression Complexity in nltk/nltkEPSS 1.6%CVE-2021-3842HIGHInefficient Regular Expression Complexity in nltk/nltkEPSS 1.6%CVE-2025-14009HIGHZip Slip Vulnerability in nltk/nltk Leading to Remote Code ExecutionEPSS 1.0%CVE-2026-0847HIGHPath Traversal in nltk/nltkEPSS 1.0%CVE-2026-0848CRITICALArbitrary Code Execution in NLTK StanfordSegmenter via Untrusted JAR LoadingEPSS 0.8%CVE-2026-0846HIGHArbitrary File Read via Absolute Path Input in nltk.util.filestring()EPSS 0.6%