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Asymmetric denial of service - ReDoS In nltk

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.

Mitigation

Update Impact

Minimal update. May introduce new vulnerabilities or breaking changes.

Ecosystem
Component
Affected version
Patched versions