CVE-2026-81723
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
Summary
NLTK versions before 3.10.3 contain a quadratic CPU exhaustion vulnerability in XMLCorpusView._read_xml_fragment() that rescans accumulated XML fragments on every 1 KiB block read. Attackers can provide malformed XML corpus files to cause severe CPU consumption and denial of service through affected readers like BNCCorpusReader.
Affected Software
| Vendor | Product | Version Range | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| nltk | nltk | 0 < 3.10.3 | affected |
| nltk | nltk | 3.10.3 | unaffected |
Weaknesses
- CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
ADP Enrichment
CISA ADP Vulnrichment
- SSVC:
- Exploitation: poc
- Automatable: no
- Technical Impact: partial
Additional References
References
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk/security/advisories/GHSA-vp2x-qp44-57v7
- https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/nltk-before-3.10.3-quadratic-cpu-exhaustion-via-xmlcorpusview
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