Advisories

NLTK before 3.10.0 Remote Code Execution via Unsafe Pickle Deserialization

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severity
critical
date
Affecting
  • nltk >= 0, < 3.10.0

CWE
  • CWE-502 Deserialization of Untrusted Data
CVSS
9.4
CVSS V4 Vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H
Credit
ekaf
Description
NLTK before 3.10.0 (affected versions <=3.9.4) contains an unsafe pickle deserialization vulnerability in the TransitionParser.parse() method (nltk/parse/transitionparser.py). The method calls pickle_load() with the default restricted=False, routing deserialization through WarningUnpickler, which does not override find_class() and therefore permits arbitrary class resolution. When an application loads an attacker-crafted model file, embedded pickle gadget chains execute arbitrary Python code with the privileges of the user running the application. NLTK provides a RestrictedUnpickler for safe deserialization, but it is not used by production code paths. Fixed in 3.10.0.

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