CVE-2026-81723

NameCVE-2026-81723
DescriptionNLTK 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.
SourceCVE (at NVD; CERT, ENISA, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Debian ELTS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source PackageReleaseVersionStatus
nltk (PTS)bookworm3.8-1vulnerable
trixie3.9.1-2vulnerable
forky, sid3.10.3-1fixed

The information below is based on the following data on fixed versions.

PackageTypeReleaseFixed VersionUrgencyOriginDebian Bugs
nltksource(unstable)3.10.3-1

Notes

[trixie] - nltk <no-dsa> (Minor issue)
[bookworm] - nltk <postponed> (Minor issue)
https://github.com/nltk/nltk/security/advisories/GHSA-vp2x-qp44-57v7

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