CVE-2026-33236

high

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. In versions 3.9.3 and prior, the NLTK downloader does not validate the `subdir` and `id` attributes when processing remote XML index files. Attackers can control a remote XML index server to provide malicious values containing path traversal sequences (such as `../`), which can lead to arbitrary directory creation, arbitrary file creation, and arbitrary file overwrite. Commit 89fe2ec2c6bae6e2e7a46dad65cc34231976ed8a patches the issue.

References

https://github.com/nltk/nltk/security/advisories/GHSA-469j-vmhf-r6v7

https://github.com/nltk/nltk/commit/89fe2ec2c6bae6e2e7a46dad65cc34231976ed8a

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2026-03-20

Updated: 2026-03-20

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 9.4

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:C/A:C

Severity: High

CVSS v3

Base Score: 8.1

Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H

Severity: High

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00043