Resource Exhaustion Affecting nltk package, versions <3.10.3-1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
low
0
10

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Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.22% (13th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-DEBIANUNSTABLE-NLTK-19385599
  • published28 Aug 2026
  • disclosed27 Aug 2026

Introduced: 27 Aug 2026

NewCVE-2026-81723  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-400  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade Debian:unstable nltk to version 3.10.3-1 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream nltk package and not the nltk package as distributed by Debian. See How to fix? for Debian:unstable relevant fixed versions and status.

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.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1