GHSA-qx2g-xrx7-vfh8 CVE-2026-72818 PYSEC-2026-3870
NLTK TweetTokenizer vulnerable to denial of service through catastrophic regex backtracking
- Severity
- 0.0 / 10
- High · CVSS 4.0
- Exploit chance (EPSS)
- 0.74%
- Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 54.69% of scored vulnerabilities.
- Known exploited
- No
- Not in CISA's catalog
- Weakness
- CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
- Fix
3.10.1- Upgrade nltk to this version or later
Description
The URLS regular expression in nltk/tokenize/casual.py, compiled into TweetTokenizer.WORD_RE and applied by TweetTokenizer.tokenize, contains a naked-domain branch whose domain-label prefix [a-z0-9]+(?:[.-][a-z0-9]+)* is unbounded. Input consisting of many alternating label separators can be partitioned in exponentially many ways, and because the branch also requires a trailing top-level domain that such input never supplies, the engine explores those partitions before failing at each offset. A few kilobytes of input therefore consumes seconds to minutes of single-threaded CPU, and the HANG_RE substitution performed before matching does not collapse the pattern. TweetTokenizer is intended for tokenizing untrusted social-media text, so any service that applies it, or the module-level casual_tokenize, to submitted text can be stalled per request without authentication. Version 3.10.1 bounds the label repetition.
Affected versions
PyPI
| Package | Vulnerable | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| nltk | < 3.10.1 |
3.10.1 |
How to fix
Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.
nltk PyPI → 3.10.1
- pip
pip install --upgrade "nltk>=3.10.1"- poetry
poetry add "nltk>=3.10.1"- uv
uv add "nltk>=3.10.1"
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
- 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
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
Packages
Other links
- github.com/nltk/nltk/issues/3704
- github.com/nltk/nltk/pull/3701
- github.com/nltk/nltk/commit/e092ed52eccae642304448bffc8d23cb301f85c1
- github.com/nltk/nltk/blob/3.9.4/nltk/tokenize/casual.py
- github.com/nltk/nltk/releases/tag/v3.10.1
- vulncheck.com/advisories/nltk-tweettokenizer-url-pattern-backtracks-catastrophical…
Timeline
- Published
- Last updated by the source
- Latest EPSS score
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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