CVE-2026-81723
NLTK before 3.10.3 Quadratic CPU Exhaustion via XMLCorpusView
MEDIUM 6.3EPSS 0.2%
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
- nltk
- CVSS v4.0 VULNCHECK
- 6.3 MEDIUM
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/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X - CVSS v4.0 GitHub
- 6.3 MEDIUM
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 - CVSS v3.1 VULNCHECK
- 3.7 LOW
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L - EPSS
- 0.22% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, 13th percentile
- Published
- 2026-08-27
- Updated
- 2026-08-31