CVE-2026-78681: high-severity vulnerability in nltk
NLTK before 3.10.3 Entity Expansion DoS via ElementTree
Published · Updated
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21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.7epss 0.5%
NLTK versions before 3.10.3 use xml.etree.ElementTree to parse XML in multiple modules, which honors entity declarations in document DTDs. Attackers can craft XML payloads with nested entity declarations that expand from hundreds of bytes to megabytes in memory, causing denial of service.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected products
nltk · nltkRelated CVEs — nltk
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2021-43854HIGHInefficient Regular Expression Complexity in nltkEPSS 2.8%CVE-2026-79657CRITICALNLTK before 3.10.3 Remote Code Execution via Unsafe Pickle DeserializationEPSS 1.3%CVE-2026-33231HIGHNLTK has unauthenticated remote shutdown in nltk.app.wordnet_appEPSS 1.3%CVE-2026-71513HIGHNLTK 3.10.0 through 3.10.2 Remote Code Execution via AllowlistUnpickler Dotted-Name BypassEPSS 1.1%CVE-2026-79675CRITICALNLTK before 3.10.3 JVM Argument Injection via Per-Call OptionsEPSS 0.8%CVE-2026-72818HIGHNLTK TweetTokenizer URL Pattern Backtracks Catastrophically on Naked-Domain-Like InputEPSS 0.7%