Skip to content
OpenAdvisories
Medium · 5.3 CVE-2026-81724 EUVD-2026-67074GHSA-cw6x-m8jw-qmrhGHSA-pf76-q698-37v8PYSEC-2026-3739

NLTK before 3.10.3 Denial of Service via Uncontrolled Recursion

Published Aug 27, 2026 · Updated Aug 27, 2026 · Assigned by VulnCheck

Description

NLTK before 3.10.3 contains an uncontrolled recursion vulnerability in nltk.featstruct.FeatStructReader that allows unauthenticated attackers to cause a denial of service by supplying deeply nested feature-structure input. Attackers can craft trivial payloads with nested brackets that exceed Python's recursion limit and raise an unhandled RecursionError, crashing applications that parse user-supplied feature structures or feature grammars.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
nltk nltk < 3.10.3 3.10.3

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 nltk 3.10.3-1 —
Debian 13 nltk No fix yet —
Debian 12 nltk No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu Pro 26.04 LTS nltk No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 24.04 LTS nltk No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS nltk No fix yet —
Show 4 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu Pro 20.04 LTS nltk No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS nltk No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS nltk No fix yet —
Ubuntu Pro 14.04 LTS nltk No fix yet —

Wolfi

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Wolfi rolling open-webui 0.11.3-r1 —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
PyPI nltk < 3.10.3 3.10.3 GHSA-cw6x-m8jw-qmrh

References