CVE-2026-80206CWE-1333

CVE-2026-80206

Medium · published August 26, 2026

CVSS v3.1
5.9
EPSS
0%
Percentile
37.2
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.9 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVSS v4.0
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
EPSS
0.00440 · 37.2th percentile
Weakness
CWE-1333 · Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
Published
2026-08-26T15:16Z
Affected products (1)
ProductVersionsFixed in
nltk/nltk< 3.10.33.10.3
References (3)
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 28 AUG 06:54Z
    EPSS moved — → 0%
    epss
  • 26 AUG 10:28Z
    NLTK 3.10.2 Regular Expression Denial of Service via tgrep
    cvelistv5