GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI
GHSA-qx2g-xrx7-vfh8 NLTK TweetTokenizer vulnerable to denial of service through catastrophic regex backtracking
HIGH
Official page ↗
- Aliases
- CVE-2026-72818
- Ecosystem
- PyPI
- Packages
- nltk
- Severity
- High
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- Weaknesses
- CWE-1333
- Reviewed
- 2026-09-02
Affected packages
• PyPI nltk: < 3.10.1 → fixed in 3.10.1
Description
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.
Related
Alias · CVE (1)
- CVE-2026-72818 The URLS regular expression in nltk/tokenize/casual.py, compiled into TweetTokenizer.WORD_RE and applied by TweetTokenizer.tokenize,… vulnerability
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity weakness
References
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-72818 advisory
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk/issues/3704 web
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk/pull/3701 web
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk/commit/e092ed52eccae642304448bffc8d23cb301f85c1 web
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk package
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk/blob/3.9.4/nltk/tokenize/casual.py web
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk/releases/tag/v3.10.1 web
- https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/nltk-tweettokenizer-url-pattern-backtracks-catastrophically-on-naked-domain-like-input web