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Fencer Intel
low 3.7

CVE-2026-81723 json

NLTK before 3.10.3 Quadratic CPU Exhaustion via XMLCorpusView

published 2mo ago modified last mo. also EUVD-2026-67073 , GHSA-vp2x-qp44-57v7 , PYSEC-2026-3871

cvss
3.7
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 20%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

NLTK versions before 3.10.3 contain a quadratic CPU exhaustion vulnerability in XMLCorpusView._read_xml_fragment() that rescans accumulated XML fragments on every 1 KiB block read. Attackers can provide malformed XML corpus files to cause severe CPU consumption and denial of service through affected readers like BNCCorpusReader.

Patch / fix

  • pypi nltk 3.10.3
  • nltk nltk 3.10.3
  • nltk Debian 14 3.10.3-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-81723

Is CVE-2026-81723 in your dependencies? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-81723 updated cvss 5.9

nltk: NLTK: Denial of Service via malformed XML corpus files

  • Red Hat Exploit Intelligence exploit-intelligence-tech-preview/vulnerability-analysis-rhel9
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Lightspeed Core lightspeed-core/rag-tool-cpu-rhel9, lightspeed-core/lightspeed-stack-rhel9, lightspeed-core/rag-tool-cuda-12.9-rhel9 Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed openshift-lightspeed/lightspeed-ocp-rag-rhel9, openshift-lightspeed/lightspeed-service-api-rhel9, openshift-lightspeed-tech-preview/lightspeed-rag-tool-rhel9
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 ansible-automation-platform-25/lightspeed-chatbot-rhel8
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) rhoai/odh-ogx-core-rhel9, rhoai/odh-ta-lmes-job-rhel9, rhoai/odh-llama-stack-core-rhel9, rhoai/odh-trustyai-garak-lls-provider-dsp-rhel9, rhoai/odh-trustyai-nemo-guardrails-server-rhel9, rhoai/odh-pipeline-runtime-pytorch-llmcompressor-cuda-py312-rhel9, +1 more
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.28% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 20% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-11).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/nltk/nltk/security/advisories/GHSA-vp2x-qp44-57v7 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 4.0 6.3 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
CNA 3.1 3.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
GitHub 3.1 3.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CNA 4.0 6.3 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/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
OSV 3.1 3.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
pypi nltk
<3.10.3
3.10.3

Affected products

  • nltk nltk

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
  • CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.

The maintainers of nltk/nltk published their own advisory on GitHub. Reviewed sources take precedence over it.

CPEs and fixed versions use Anchore's correction of NVD's data: Added CPE configurations because not yet analyzed by NVD.