CVE-2026-81725: medium-severity vulnerability in nltk
NLTK before 3.10.3 Regular Expression Denial of Service via Pl196xCorpusReader
Published · Updated
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13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 6.3epss 0.4%
NLTK before 3.10.3 contains a regular expression denial of service vulnerability in Pl196xCorpusReader that allows attackers to cause quadratic CPU consumption by supplying malformed TEI blocks with many unmatched opening tags. Attackers can exploit lazy regex patterns in the read_block method through public APIs like words() and tagged_words() to force repeated rescans and achieve near-quadratic runtime growth.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/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 1.2%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%