Bug 2512477

Summary: CVE-2026-12261 python-nltk: NLTK: Resource poisoning via improper package archive extraction [fedora-all]
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Marian Rehak <mrehak>
Component: python-nltkAssignee: José Matos <jamatos>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 45CC: jamatos, python-packagers-sig, romain.geissler
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security, SecurityTracking
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Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard: {"flaws": ["781da8bb-c9a7-42dc-b23c-59da147c7623"]}
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Bug Depends On:    
Bug Blocks: 2512413    

Description Marian Rehak 2026-08-07 11:33:37 UTC
Disclaimer: Community trackers are created by Red Hat Product Security team on a best effort basis. Package maintainers are required to ascertain if the flaw indeed affects their package, before starting the update process.

A vulnerability in `nltk.downloader` in nltk/nltk versions <= 3.9.4 allows for cross-package resource and model poisoning. The downloader extracts package archives into shared namespaces such as `corpora/` and `taggers/` instead of package-isolated roots, and validates package integrity only after the archive has been written and extracted. This design flaw enables one package to overwrite another package's trusted resources within the same namespace, making the changes immediately active through ordinary NLTK APIs. This issue persists across fresh interpreter restarts and can affect downstream workflows, including machine learning pipelines and reproducibility-sensitive environments.

Comment 1 Aoife Moloney 2026-08-17 15:49:17 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora Linux 45 development cycle.
Changing version to 45.