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HIGH

CVE-2026-72818

CVSS v3

7.5

HIGH

EPSS Score

0.7 %

exploit probability, as of 2026-10-16

CISA KEV

No

known exploited

Exploitation

—

SSVC status

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Affected and fixed versions

Packages from OSV.dev and products from the vendors' CSAF advisories.

version not verifiedVersions not verified: read as OSV.dev and the vendors publish them, not checked against each vendor's release list.

Packages

  • nltkPyPIall versions · fixed in 3.10.1

Vendor advisories

  • CVE-2026-72818 Red Hat Product Security5 known affected

    nltk: NLTK TweetTokenizer: Denial of Service via crafted URL input

    lightspeed-core/lightspeed-stack-rhel9 as a component of Lightspeed Core · lightspeed-core/rag-tool-cpu-rhel9 as a component of Lightspeed Core · lightspeed-core/rag-tool-cuda-12.9-rhel9 as a component of Lightspeed Core

Full record on NVD

Description

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.

Technical details

CVSS v3 Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Published
2026-08-20
Last Modified
2026-08-21

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-72818?

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.

Is CVE-2026-72818 actively exploited?

Active exploitation of CVE-2026-72818 has not been confirmed. Its EPSS score was 0.7% on 2026-10-16, the estimated probability of exploitation in the next 30 days.

What is the CVSS score for CVE-2026-72818?

CVE-2026-72818 has a CVSS v3 base score of 7.5 (HIGH severity), with vector string CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

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