CVE-2026-78681

Summary

NLTK versions before 3.10.3 use xml.etree.ElementTree to parse XML in multiple modules, which honors entity declarations in document DTDs. Attackers can craft XML payloads with nested entity declarations that expand from hundreds of bytes to megabytes in memory, causing denial of service.

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
nltknltk0 < 3.10.3affected
nltknltk3.10.3unaffected

Weaknesses

  • CWE-776: Improper Restriction of Recursive Entity References in DTDs ('XML Entity Expansion')

References