CVE-2026-81723: NLTK: Quadratic CPU Exhaustion in `XMLCorpusView._read_xml_fragment()`
XMLCorpusView._read_xml_fragment() reads a corpus file in 1 KiB blocks, appending
each block to a growing fragment string, then calls _VALID_XML_RE.match(fragment)
on the full accumulated buffer every iteration. Because each iteration rescans the
entire accumulated fragment, the total amount of work grows quadratically with input
size.
Commit c9c332284 (CWE-1333) made each match() call linear. The quadratic behavior
is separate: the loop calls match() once per 1 KiB block, each time on a longer
buffer.
On the test system, an 8 MiB malformed XML file consumed approximately 48 CPU-seconds
through the public BNCCorpusReader.words() API with no source modification. Absolute
timings vary by hardware. _read_xml_fragment() imposes no limit on fragment size or
iteration count.
References
- github.com/advisories/GHSA-vp2x-qp44-57v7
- github.com/nltk/nltk/commit/7808692d451b962711005d954859bb83aabcf8fa
- github.com/nltk/nltk/releases/tag/v3.10.3
- github.com/nltk/nltk/security/advisories/GHSA-vp2x-qp44-57v7
- nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-81723
- www.vulncheck.com/advisories/nltk-before-3.10.3-quadratic-cpu-exhaustion-via-xmlcorpusview
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