CVE-2026-81725
Received Received - Intake

NLTK Regex DoS in Pl196xCorpusReader

Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-81725, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.

Publication date: 2026-08-27

Last updated on: 2026-08-27

Assigner: VulnCheck

Description

NLTK before 3.10.3 contains a regular expression denial of service vulnerability in Pl196xCorpusReader that allows attackers to cause quadratic CPU consumption by supplying malformed TEI blocks with many unmatched opening tags. Attackers can exploit lazy regex patterns in the read_block method through public APIs like words() and tagged_words() to force repeated rescans and achieve near-quadratic runtime growth.

CVSS Scores

EPSS Scores

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Meta Information

Published
2026-08-27
Last Modified
2026-08-27
Generated
2026-08-27
EPSS Evaluated
N/A
NVD
EUVD

Affected Vendors & Products

Showing 1 associated CPE
Vendor Product Version / Range
nltk nltk to 3.10.3 (exc)

Helpful Resources

Exploitability

CWE
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KEV
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CWE ID Description
CWE-400 The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.

Attack-Flow Graph

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EPSS Chart