Skip to content
Fencer Intel
low 3.7

CVE-2026-81725 json

NLTK before 3.10.3 Regular Expression Denial of Service via Pl196xCorpusReader

published 2mo ago modified 2mo ago also EUVD-2026-67075 , GHSA-8mpw-7fpc-4gqj , PYSEC-2026-3752

cvss
3.7
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 31%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

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

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-81725

Is CVE-2026-81725 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.

Check with Fencer

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-2026-81725 updated cvss 5.9

nltk: NLTK: Regular Expression Denial of Service via malformed TEI blocks

  • Red Hat Exploit Intelligence exploit-intelligence-tech-preview/vulnerability-analysis-rhel9 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-service-api-rhel9, openshift-lightspeed-tech-preview/lightspeed-rag-tool-rhel9 Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 ansible-automation-platform-25/lightspeed-chatbot-rhel8 Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) rhoai/odh-ogx-core-rhel9
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat OpenShift AI 3.4 rhoai/odh-ta-lmes-job-rhel9 1791470318, rhoai/odh-llama-stack-core-rhel9 1790958470, rhoai/odh-trustyai-garak-lls-provider-dsp-rhel9 1791785804, rhoai/odh-trustyai-nemo-guardrails-server-rhel9 1791556128, rhoai/odh-pipeline-runtime-pytorch-llmcompressor-cuda-py312-rhel9 1791829658, rhoai/odh-workbench-jupyter-pytorch-llmcompressor-cuda-py312-rhel9 1791832538
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2026:84734
  • Red Hat OpenShift AI 3.5 rhoai/odh-trustyai-nemo-guardrails-server-rhel9 1791566631
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2026:86891
  • Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed openshift-lightspeed/lightspeed-ocp-rag-rhel9
    not affected: component not present
  • Red Hat OpenShift AI 3.4 rhoai/odh-cli-rhel9 1791509689, rhoai/rhai-cli-rhel9 1791509689, rhoai/odh-automl-rhel9 1791535789, rhoai/odh-mlflow-rhel9 1791865967, rhoai/odh-autorag-rhel9 1791557539, rhoai/odh-trainer-rhel9 1791869783, +94 more Red Hat OpenShift AI 3.5 rhoai/odh-cli-rhel9 1791945905, rhoai/rhai-cli-rhel9 1791945905, rhoai/odh-automl-rhel9 1791916705, rhoai/odh-mlflow-rhel9 1791947857, rhoai/odh-autorag-rhel9 1791903266, rhoai/odh-trainer-rhel9 1791952138, +112 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

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
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.37% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 31% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-11).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/nltk/nltk/security/advisories/GHSA-8mpw-7fpc-4gqj 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
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

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-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression 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.