Bug 2525094 (CVE-2026-81725)

Summary:	CVE-2026-81725 nltk: NLTK: Regular Expression Denial of Service via malformed TEI blocks
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified	CC:	anpicker, bparees, dschmidt, ebourniv, hasun, jfula, jlanda, jowilson, kshier, nyancey, ometelka, ptisnovs, sbunciak, simaishi, stcannon, syedriko, teagle, xdharmai, yguenane
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Security
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	---
Doc Text:	A flaw was found in NLTK, specifically within the Pl196xCorpusReader component. A remote attacker can exploit this by supplying malformed Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) blocks containing numerous unmatched opening tags. This triggers a regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) vulnerability, causing quadratic CPU consumption and leading to a denial of service.	Story Points:	---
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Last Closed:		Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:	2528006, 2528007
Bug Blocks:

Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-08-27 16:59:27 UTC

NLTK before 3.10.3 contains a regular expression denial of service vulnerability in Pl196xCorpusReader that allows attackers to cause quadratic CPU consumption by supplying malformed TEI blocks with many unmatched opening tags. Attackers can exploit lazy regex patterns in the read_block method through public APIs like words() and tagged_words() to force repeated rescans and achieve near-quadratic runtime growth.