GHSA-2rrw-hpqm-36pv
Duplicate Advisory: ReDoS in nltk.text.Text.findall() via unvalidated user-supplied regular expressions
- Severity
- 0.0 / 10
- High · CVSS 4.0
- Exploit chance (EPSS)
- —
- No score published
- Known exploited
- No
- Not in CISA's catalog
- Weakness
- CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
- Fix
- None yet
- No fixed version published
Description
Duplicate Advisory
This advisory has been withdrawn because it is a duplicate of GHSA-rrv8-h7p8-rx55. This link is maintained to preserve external references.
Original Description
NLTK versions before 3.10.0 contain a regular expression denial of service vulnerability in Text.findall() and TokenSearcher.findall() methods that accept user-supplied regular expressions without validation or timeout. Attackers can supply crafted regex patterns that cause catastrophic backtracking, resulting in indefinite CPU saturation and denial of service to all users of the Python process.
Affected versions
PyPI
| Package | Vulnerable | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| nltk | <= 3.9.4 |
No fix yet |
How to fix
No fixed version has been published yet. Until one is, remove or replace the package, or turn off or isolate the affected feature. This page updates when a fix ships.
Severity breakdown
CVSS 4.0 0.0
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/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X
- Attack vector
- Network
- Attack complexity
- Low
- Attack requirements
- None
- Privileges required
- None
- User interaction
- None
- Confidentiality (vulnerable system)
- None
- Integrity (vulnerable system)
- None
- Availability (vulnerable system)
- High
- Confidentiality (subsequent systems)
- None
- Integrity (subsequent systems)
- None
- Availability (subsequent systems)
- None
- Exploit maturity
- Not defined
- Scope
- X
CVSS 3.1 7.5
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Attack vector
- Network
- Attack complexity
- Low
- Privileges required
- None
- User interaction
- None
- Scope
- Unchanged
- Confidentiality
- None
- Integrity
- None
- Availability
- High
Weakness
CWE-1333: Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
The product uses a regular expression with a worst-case computational complexity that is inefficient and possibly exponential.
How to prevent it
- Architecture and Design: Use regular expressions that do not support backtracking, e.g. by removing nested quantifiers.
- System Configuration: Set backtracking limits in the configuration of the regular expression implementation, such as PHP's pcre.backtrack_limit. Also consider limits on execution time for the process.
- Implementation: Do not use regular expressions with untrusted input. If regular expressions must be used, avoid using backtracking in the expression.
- Implementation: Limit the length of the input that the regular expression will process.
References
Advisories
Other links
Timeline
- Published
- Withdrawn
- Last updated by the source
Related advisories
| Advisory | Severity | Why it's related |
|---|---|---|
| GHSA-j456-xh4h-cpf2 NLTK: WekaClassifier passes an unvalidated caller-controlled model path to the weka JVM, bypassing nltk.pathsec containment | High | Also affects nltk |
| GHSA-ff5c-cp5c-9wjf NLTK: Uncontrolled resource consumption in RecursiveDescentParser via ambiguous or left-recursive grammars | Medium | Also affects nltk |
| GHSA-f794-5jv7-7672 NLTK: Downloader.download follows hardlinks and overwrites outside-root files | High | Also affects nltk |
| GHSA-8mgp-746c-j5xp NLTK: Model-artifact APIs bypass pathsec and touch files outside allowed roots | High | Also affects nltk |
| GHSA-8mpw-7fpc-4gqj NLTK: Pl196xCorpusReader has quadratic ReDoS on malformed TEI blocks | Low | Also affects nltk |
| GHSA-cw6x-m8jw-qmrh NLTK: Uncontrolled recursion in nltk.featstruct.FeatStructReader causes unhandled RecursionError (DoS) via deeply nested feature-structure input | Medium | Also affects nltk |
| GHSA-vp2x-qp44-57v7 NLTK: Quadratic CPU Exhaustion in `XMLCorpusView._read_xml_fragment()` | Low | Also affects nltk |
| GHSA-ww6m-cw3f-q94g NLTK: Quadratic-time DoS in PorterStemmer via long runs of 'y' | High | Also affects nltk |
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