Advisories

NLTK 3.10.2 Regular Expression Denial of Service via tgrep

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severity
medium
date
Affecting
  • nltk >= 0, < 3.10.3

CWE
  • CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
CVSS
8.2
CVSS V4 Vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Credit
infycore, ekaf, agent-kira
Description
NLTK before 3.10.3 contains a regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) vulnerability in the tgrep module. The _tgrep_node_action function compiles user-supplied regular expressions embedded in /regex/ pattern nodes and executes them via re.search against tree node labels without any validation or timeout. An attacker who controls the tgrep pattern (e.g., via tgrep_positions() or tgrep_compile() exposed to external input) can supply a pattern that triggers catastrophic backtracking, causing indefinite CPU saturation that blocks the Python process.

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