CVE-2026-81722: high-severity vulnerability in nltk
nltk PorterStemmer before 3.10.3 Quadratic-time DoS
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.7epss 0.5%
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 · 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%