CVE-2025-71408: NLTK vulnerable to Eval Injection via collocations CLI arguments
(updated )
NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) before version 3.9.3 contains an eval injection vulnerability in the nltk.collocations module that allows an attacker who controls command-line arguments to execute arbitrary Python code. When collocations.py is invoked directly, the main block passes command-line arguments directly to eval() as suffixes of BigramAssocMeasures without allowlist validation or sanitization, enabling an attacker to supply a Python expression that escapes the intended attribute lookup and executes arbitrary code including OS commands via the os module.
References
- aydinnyunus.github.io/2026/06/07/command-injection-nltk-collocations-eval
- github.com/advisories/GHSA-848c-c2cx-j7qx
- github.com/nltk/nltk/commit/66f14096d952ec8f04934f515e027534bd4eb0ac
- github.com/nltk/nltk/pull/3465
- github.com/nltk/nltk/releases/tag/3.9.3
- github.com/pypa/advisory-database/tree/main/vulns/nltk/PYSEC-2026-3657.yaml
- nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-71408
- www.vulncheck.com/advisories/nltk-eval-injection-via-collocations-py-command-line-arguments
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