CVE-2021-43854

Published Dec 23, 2021

Last updated 3 years ago

Overview

Description
NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is a suite of open source Python modules, data sets, and tutorials supporting research and development in Natural Language Processing. Versions prior to 3.6.5 are vulnerable to regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) attacks. The vulnerability is present in PunktSentenceTokenizer, sent_tokenize and word_tokenize. Any users of this class, or these two functions, are vulnerable to the ReDoS attack. In short, a specifically crafted long input to any of these vulnerable functions will cause them to take a significant amount of execution time. If your program relies on any of the vulnerable functions for tokenizing unpredictable user input, then we would strongly recommend upgrading to a version of NLTK without the vulnerability. For users unable to upgrade the execution time can be bounded by limiting the maximum length of an input to any of the vulnerable functions. Our recommendation is to implement such a limit.
Source
security-advisories@github.com
NVD status
Analyzed

Risk scores

CVSS 3.1

Type
Primary
Base score
7.5
Impact score
3.6
Exploitability score
3.9
Vector string
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Severity
HIGH

CVSS 2.0

Type
Primary
Base score
5
Impact score
2.9
Exploitability score
10
Vector string
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Weaknesses

security-advisories@github.com
CWE-400

Social media

Hype score
Not currently trending

Configurations