nltk is vulnerable to Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

The remote Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / 16.04 LTS / 18.04 LTS / 20.04 LTS host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the USN-7365-1 advisory.

    It was discovered that NLTK contained a regex that is susceptible to catastrophic backtracking. An     attacker could possibly use this issue to cause a denial of service. (CVE-2021-3842, CVE-2021-43854)

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

  - nltk is vulnerable to Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity (CVE-2021-3842)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

There are packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability referenced in the following CVE:

  - nltk is vulnerable to Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity (CVE-2021-3842)

ID	Name	Product	Family	Type	Severity
233286	Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / 16.04 LTS / 18.04 LTS / 20.04 LTS : NLTK vulnerabilities (USN-7365-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	Local	high
224010	Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2021-3842	Nessus	Misc.	Local	high
418870	SCA: security update for nltk (GHSA-rqjh-jp2r-59cj)	Tenable Cloud Security	SCA Checks	Local	high
418870	SCA: security update for nltk (GHSA-rqjh-jp2r-59cj)	Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security	SCA Checks	Local	high

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2021-3842

high

Tenable Plugins

high

high

high

high