GitHub Advisoryadvisory · PyPI

GHSA-qx2g-xrx7-vfh8 NLTK TweetTokenizer vulnerable to denial of service through catastrophic regex backtracking

HIGH Published 2026-08-21 Modified 2026-09-02 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