CVE-2026-80206

medium
Assigned by CNA: vulncheck
Published 2026-08-26 · Modified 2026-08-26
CVSS v3
5.9
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4 NEW
8.2
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
VIR risk
5.9

Description

NLTK before 3.10.3 contains a regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) vulnerability in the tgrep module. The _tgrep_node_action function compiles user-supplied regular expressions embedded in /regex/ pattern nodes and executes them via re.search against tree node labels without any validation or timeout. An attacker who controls the tgrep pattern (e.g., via tgrep_positions() or tgrep_compile() exposed to external input) can supply a pattern that triggers catastrophic backtracking, causing indefinite CPU saturation that blocks the Python process.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
69%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

References

CWEs

CWE-1333

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.