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Severe, 6 weeks1496Projects326

1496 severe, 6 weeks · 326 projects

NLTKGHSA-qx2g-xrx7-vfh8

NLTK TweetTokenizer vulnerable to denial of service through catastrophic regex backtracking

NLTK

CVE-2026-72818 · Published Aug 21, 2026 · updated Sep 10, 2026

High7.5
Fix: upgrade to 3.10.1 or later
GitHub advisory

The URLS regular expression in nltk/tokenize/casual.py, compiled into TweetTokenizer.WORD_RE and applied by TweetTokenizer.tokenize, contains a naked-domain branch whose domain-label prefix [a-z0-9]+(?:[.\-][a-z0-9]+)* is unbounded. Input consisting of many alternating label separators can be partitioned in exponentially many ways, and because the branch also requires a trailing top-level domain that such input never supplies, the engine explores those partitions before failing at each offset. A few kilobytes of input therefore consumes seconds to minutes of single-threaded CPU, and the HANG_RE substitution performed before matching does not collapse the pattern. TweetTokenizer is intended for tokenizing untrusted social-media text, so any service that applies it, or the module-level casual_tokenize, to submitted text can be stalled per request without authentication. Version 3.10.1 bounds the label repetition.

Affected versions

PackageAffectedFixed in
nltk
PyPI
< 3.10.13.10.1
Details and references

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