Vulnerability PYSEC-2026-4318
Medium Risk
MEDIUM RISK
CVSS Score: 6.5
Score Range: 4.0–6.9
Medium severity vulnerabilities (CVSS 4.0–6.9). Important issues that meaningfully reduce security confidence.
2 months ago
August 03, 2026 at 08:17 AM UTC
No summary available
0.8 - 0.9.9 and 2.0b4 - 3.9.4
0.8 - 0.9.9 and 2.0b4 - 3.9.4
Details
In nltk version 3.9.4, the nltk.downloader.Downloader._download_package() function writes downloaded package bytes to disk and may extract them before enforcing SHA-256 or MD5 checksum validation. This allows an attacker to tamper with the package response body for info.url through a compromised mirror, malicious proxy, or other source-substitution condition, leading to the installation of attacker-controlled package bytes. The vulnerability can result in malicious corpus or model content being trusted by downstream users or applications.
References
Related Vulnerabilities
Other vulnerabilities affecting the same packages
High Risk
1 month ago
NLTK: Uncontrolled search path when invoking the Graphviz 'dot' binary
0.8 - 0.9.9 and 2.0b4 - 3.10.2 PYSEC-2026-3868
0.8 - 0.9.9 and 2.0b4 - 3.10.2 PYSEC-2026-3868
Unknown
1 month ago
NLTK: Uncontrolled resource consumption in RecursiveDescentParser via ambiguous or left-recursive grammars
0.8 - 0.9.9 and 2.0b4 - 3.10.2 PYSEC-2026-3869
0.8 - 0.9.9 and 2.0b4 - 3.10.2 PYSEC-2026-3869
Low Risk
1 month ago
NLTK: Quadratic CPU Exhaustion in `XMLCorpusView._read_xml_fragment()`
0.8 - 0.9.9 and 2.0b4 - 3.10.2 PYSEC-2026-3871
0.8 - 0.9.9 and 2.0b4 - 3.10.2 PYSEC-2026-3871
High Risk
1 month ago
NLTK AllowlistUnpickler dotted-name validation bypass allows remote code execution
3.10.0 - 3.10.2 PYSEC-2026-3867
3.10.0 - 3.10.2 PYSEC-2026-3867
High Risk
1 month ago
NLTK TweetTokenizer vulnerable to denial of service through catastrophic regex backtracking
0.8 - 0.9.9 and 2.0b4 - 3.10.0 PYSEC-2026-3870
0.8 - 0.9.9 and 2.0b4 - 3.10.0 PYSEC-2026-3870
Impacted packages
Timeline
Published
2 months ago
August 03, 2026 at 08:17 AM UTC
Last Modified
1 hour ago
October 16, 2026 at 10:56 AM UTC