nltk PorterStemmer before 3.10.3 Quadratic-time DoS
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.7epss 0.4%
exploitation probability
0.4%top 70% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
nltk PorterStemmer in versions <= 3.10.2 (fixed in 3.10.3) contains an inefficient-algorithmic-complexity denial of service in PorterStemmer.stem(). The _is_consonant() helper walks backward over the entire run of trailing 'y' characters on every call, and _measure() invokes it for each stem position, causing O(n^2) behavior. A single ~20-50 KB untrusted token consisting of a long run of the letter 'y' followed by a matching suffix (e.g., 'ness') can pin a CPU core for seconds to minutes, causing availability impact.
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 · nltk