CVE-2021-43854

Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in nltk

Published Dec 23, 2021 CVSS 3.1 · 7.5 High EPSS 2.8% KEV · Not listed
Description
NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is a suite of open source Python modules, data sets, and tutorials supporting research and development in Natural Language Processing. Versions prior to 3.6.5 are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) attacks. The vulnerability is present in PunktSentenceTokenizer, sent_tokenize and word_tokenize. Any users of this class, or these two functions, are vulnerable to the ReDoS attack. In short, a specifically crafted long input to any of these vulnerable functions will cause them to take a significant amount of execution time. If your program relies on any of the vulnerable functions for tokenizing unpredictable user input, then we would strongly recommend upgrading to a version of NLTK without the vulnerability. For users unable to upgrade the execution time can be bounded by limiting the maximum length of an input to any of the vulnerable functions. Our recommendation is to implement such a limit.

Remediation

No solution or workaround provided in the CVE record

Tracking

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Advisories

Source ID Title
EUVD EUVD EUVD-2021-0148 NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is a suite of open source Python modules, data sets, and tutorials supporting research and development in Natural Language Processing. Versions prior to 3.6.5 are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) attacks. The vulnerability is present in PunktSentenceTokenizer, sent_tokenize and word_tokenize. Any users of this class, or these two functions, are vulnerable to the ReDoS attack. In short, a specifically crafted long input to any of these vulnerable functions will cause them to take a significant amount of execution time. If your program relies on any of the vulnerable functions for tokenizing unpredictable user input, then we would strongly recommend upgrading to a version of NLTK without the vulnerability. For users unable to upgrade the execution time can be bounded by limiting the maximum length of an input to any of the vulnerable functions. Our recommendation is to implement such a limit.
Github GHSA Github GHSA GHSA-f8m6-h2c7-8h9x Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in nltk (word_tokenize, sent_tokenize)
Ubuntu USN Ubuntu USN USN-7365-1 NLTK vulnerabilities
History

No history.

Weaknesses

Sources

Status
PUBLISHED
Assigner
GitHub_M
Published
Updated
Aug 4, 2024, 4:10 AM
Reserved
Nov 16, 2021, 12:00 AM
Status
Modified
Published
Dec 23, 2021, 6:15 PM
Modified
Jun 17, 2026, 4:11 AM