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HIGH7.5

GHSA-qx2g-xrx7-vfh8

NLTK TweetTokenizer vulnerable to denial of service through catastrophic regex backtracking

Quick fix

GHSA-qx2g-xrx7-vfh8 — nltk: upgrade to the fixed version with the command below.

pip install --upgrade 'nltk>=3.10.1'

Details

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.

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Affected packages

PyPI/nltk
Introduced in: 0Fixed in: 3.10.1
Fixpip install --upgrade 'nltk>=3.10.1'

References