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NLTK TweetTokenizer URL Pattern Backtracks Catastrophically on Naked-Domain-Like Input

Type: advisorySource: Official CVE List1 source record

The URLS regular expression in nltk/tokenize/casual.py, compiled into TweetTokenizer.WORD_RE and applied by TweetTokenizer.tokenize, contains a naked-domain branch whose domain-label prefix [a-z0-9]+(?:[.\-][a-z0-9]+)* is unbounded. Input consisting of many alternating label separators can be partitioned in exponentially many ways, and because the branch also requires a trailing top-level domain that such input never supplies, the engine explores those partitions before failing at each offset. A few kilobytes of input therefore consumes seconds to minutes of single-threaded CPU, and the HANG_RE substitution performed before matching does not collapse the pattern. TweetTokenizer is intended for tokenizing untrusted social-media text, so any service that applies it, or the module-level casual_tokenize, to submitted text can be stalled per request without authentication. Version 3.10.1 bounds the label repetition.

Announced Group revision 1
Original source ↗

CVE-2026-72818

Primary source · Revision 1

Imported from structured advisory data. Source references identify upstream records or fields; verify affected versions and your deployed configuration.

Security context

Source reference: cve:CVE-2026-72818

nltk

Source reference: /containers/cna/affected/0/product

Affected versions
Not stated in this record
Fixed versions
Not stated in this record
Prerequisites
Not stated in this record

Structured affected-version data

Original package identities and version rules from this source.

[
  {
    "repo": "https://github.com/nltk/nltk",
    "vendor": "nltk",
    "product": "nltk",
    "versions": [
      {
        "status": "affected",
        "version": "0",
        "lessThan": "3.10.1",
        "versionType": "semver"
      },
      {
        "status": "unaffected",
        "version": "3.10.1",
        "versionType": "semver"
      }
    ],
    "packageURL": "pkg:pypi/nltk",
    "packageName": "nltk",
    "programFiles": [
      "nltk/tokenize/casual.py"
    ],
    "collectionURL": "https://pypi.org",
    "defaultStatus": "unaffected"
  }
]
Related CVEs
CVE-2026-72818

Source reference: /cveMetadata/cveId

Publisher severity

high

Source reference: /containers/cna/metrics

Event
#957 · Revision 1
Added to Heist Feed
Publisher date
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