Detections
Analytics

SCA: security update for nltk (GHSA-m42h-3232-vpv3)

high Tenable Cloud Security Plugin ID 445969

Description

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

 - NLTK version 3.9.4 is vulnerable to a path traversal attack due to an incomplete fix for GitHub Issue
 #3504. The `_UNSAFE_NO_PROTOCOL_RE` regex in `nltk/data.py` checks for literal `../` sequences but fails
 to account for percent-encoded traversal sequences such as `..%2f`. The `url2pathname()` function decodes
 these sequences after the validation step, allowing an attacker to bypass the protection. This
 vulnerability enables an attacker to read arbitrary files accessible to the Python process by controlling
 the resource name parameter passed to `nltk.data.load()` or `nltk.data.find()`. The issue affects
 applications that rely on NLTK for resource loading, including NLP web applications, Jupyter notebooks,
 and CLI tools. The default `pathsec.ENFORCE=False` setting exacerbates the impact by not blocking the file
 read at the `open()` stage. (CVE-2026-12243)

Solution

Update the nltk library and its related packages to version 3.10.0 or later.

See Also

https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-m42h-3232-vpv3

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 445969

Version: Revision 1.1

Type: Local

Family: SCA Checks

Published: 8/14/2026

Updated: 8/14/2026

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3

Percentile: 23.72

Vendor

Vendor Severity: High

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 6.1

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2026-12243

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Temporal Score: 6.7

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:P/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 8/13/2026

Vulnerability Publication Date: 6/30/2026

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2026-12243

cwe: CWE-22