CVE-2026-81725
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.
Published:Aug 27, 2026
Last Modified:Aug 31, 2026
EPS:Aug 27, 2026
EPSS Score:0.00222
CVSS Score:3.7
Affected Products
Vendor
Product
Action
Vendor
Nltk
Product
Nltk
Nltk
Nltk
Common Weakness Enumeration
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
Related CVEs
Common Vulnerability Scoring System
Attack Vector
Network
Adjacent
Local
Physical
Privileges Required
None
Low
High
User Interaction
None
Required
Scope
Unchanged
Changed
Confidentiality
None
Low
High
Integrity
None
Low
High
Availability
None
Low
High
