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.
References
Link Resource
https://github.com/nltk/nltk/commit/1405aad979c6b8080dbbc8e0858f89b2e3690341 Patch Third Party Advisory
https://github.com/nltk/nltk/issues/2866 Exploit Issue Tracking Patch Third Party Advisory
https://github.com/nltk/nltk/pull/2869 Exploit Patch Third Party Advisory
https://github.com/nltk/nltk/security/advisories/GHSA-f8m6-h2c7-8h9x Exploit Patch Third Party Advisory
History

No history.

cve-icon MITRE Information

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: GitHub_M

Published: 2021-12-23T17:55:11

Updated: 2021-12-23T17:55:11

Reserved: 2021-11-16T00:00:00


Link: CVE-2021-43854

JSON object: View

cve-icon NVD Information

Status : Analyzed

Published: 2021-12-23T18:15:07.327

Modified: 2022-01-04T16:38:20.947


Link: CVE-2021-43854

JSON object: View

cve-icon Redhat Information

No data.

CWE