CVE-2026-78681

high

Description

NLTK versions before 3.10.3 use xml.etree.ElementTree to parse XML in multiple modules, which honors entity declarations in document DTDs. Attackers can craft XML payloads with nested entity declarations that expand from hundreds of bytes to megabytes in memory, causing denial of service.

References

https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/nltk-before-entity-expansion-dos-via-elementtree

https://github.com/nltk/nltk/security/advisories/GHSA-97qj-x29f-37w7

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2026-08-25

Updated: 2026-08-26

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 7.8

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

Severity: High

CVSS v3

Base Score: 7.5

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

Severity: High

CVSS v4

Base Score: 8.7

Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Severity: High

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00278