NLTK 3.10.2 Regular Expression Denial of Service via tgrep
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.2epss 0.3%
exploitation probability
0.3%top 81% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
NLTK before 3.10.3 contains a regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) vulnerability in the tgrep module. The _tgrep_node_action function compiles user-supplied regular expressions embedded in /regex/ pattern nodes and executes them via re.search against tree node labels without any validation or timeout. An attacker who controls the tgrep pattern (e.g., via tgrep_positions() or tgrep_compile() exposed to external input) can supply a pattern that triggers catastrophic backtracking, causing indefinite CPU saturation that blocks the Python process.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected products
nltk · nltk