NLTK before 3.10.3 contains a remote code execution vulnerability in AllowlistUnpickler that validates only the pickle module string and not the global name, allowing attackers to resolve dotted names by attribute traversal to callables outside the allowlisted namespace. Attackers can craft untrusted transition-parser models that execute arbitrary commands when TransitionParser.parse loads the model through allowlisted_pickle_load.
https://github.com/nltk/nltk/commit/c3e37113742a1ebeeb4f2ca58941f320f98805ea
https://github.com/nltk/nltk/blob/v3.10.2/nltk/picklesec.py#L119-L124
Published: 2026-08-22
Updated: 2026-08-22
Base Score: 10
Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C
Severity: Critical
Base Score: 8.8
Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Severity: High
Base Score: 8.7
Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Severity: High