PYSEC-2026-3869

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PYSEC-2026-3869

Summary: NLTK: Uncontrolled resource consumption in RecursiveDescentParser via ambiguous or left-recursive grammars

Details: `nltk.parse.RecursiveDescentParser` (and `SteppingRecursiveDescentParser`) enumerate parses top-down with no bound on the number of recursive steps. A small, crafted context-free grammar makes a short input consume unbounded CPU (and/or exhaust the Python recursion stack), pinning a process indefinitely — a denial of service. ## Proof of concept Both of the following hang on a 24-token input (killed after 8s; growth is super-linear in input length), on NLTK develop: ```python from nltk import CFG from nltk.parse import RecursiveDescentParser # (a) left recursion -> unbounded recursion g = CFG.fromstring("S -> S S | 'a'") list(RecursiveDescentParser(g).parse(["a"] * 24)) # hangs # (b) ambiguous grammar -> exponential number of parses g = CFG.fromstring("S -> 'a' S | 'a' S S | 'a'") list(RecursiveDescentParser(g).parse(["a"] * 24)) # hangs ``` ## Impact An application that runs `RecursiveDescentParser` on a grammar (or an input) drawn from an untrusted source can be driven into an unbounded CPU / stack-exhaustion loop by a tiny payload. No confidentiality or integrity impact; single-process availability only. ## Sibling The RegexpTokenizer ReDoS reported alongside this (CVE-2026-12875) is a different class (caller-supplied regex) and is addressed under GHSA-w3v8-gmh9-3wv7.

References: https://github.com/nltk/nltk/security/advisories/GHSA-ff5c-cp5c-9wjf, https://github.com/nltk/nltk/pull/3649, https://github.com/nltk/nltk/commit/43aaca1b9024138421c97f970bf13ee19ac8129d, https://github.com/nltk/nltk, https://github.com/nltk/nltk/releases/tag/v3.10.3, https://pypi.org/project/nltk, https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-ff5c-cp5c-9wjf, https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-12876