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Advisories

NLTK from 3.2.5 before 3.10.4 CPU Exhaustion via TreebankWordTokenizer.span_tokenize

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Severity
medium
Date
Affecting

  • nltk >= 3.2.5, < 3.10.4

CWE
  • CWE-407 Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity
CVSS
6.9
CVSS V4 Vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Credit
manus-pi, manus-use
Description
NLTK from 3.2.5 before 3.10.4 contains an algorithmic complexity vulnerability in TreebankWordTokenizer.span_tokenize that allows remote attackers to cause quadratic CPU consumption through repeated list.pop(0) calls. Attackers can submit long runs of double-quote characters to services span-tokenizing untrusted text, exhausting a CPU core and degrading availability.

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