NLTK before 3.10.4 contains a denial of service vulnerability in Tree.chomsky_normal_form that allows remote attackers to exhaust CPU through quadratic-time right-factor binarization using list.pop(0). Attackers can supply a wide flat treebank tree parsed by Tree.fromstring to force tens of seconds of single-threaded CPU consumption, blocking the processing thread.
Advisories

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Fixes

Solution

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Workaround

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History

Fri, 13 Nov 2026 09:45:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description NLTK before 3.10.4 contains a denial of service vulnerability in Tree.chomsky_normal_form that allows remote attackers to exhaust CPU through quadratic-time right-factor binarization using list.pop(0). Attackers can supply a wide flat treebank tree parsed by Tree.fromstring to force tens of seconds of single-threaded CPU consumption, blocking the processing thread.
Title NLTK before 3.10.4 Quadratic CPU Denial of Service via Tree.chomsky_normal_form
First Time appeared Nltk
Nltk nltk
Weaknesses CWE-400
CPEs cpe:2.3:a:nltk:nltk:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
Vendors & Products Nltk
Nltk nltk
References
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 7.5, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H'}

cvssV4_0

{'score': 8.7, 'vector': 'CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N'}


Projects

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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: VulnCheck

Published:

Updated: 2026-11-13T09:36:27.213Z

Reserved: 2026-11-10T20:15:54.612Z

Link: CVE-2026-126298

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

Status : Awaiting Analysis

Published: 2026-11-13T10:17:34.580

Modified: 2026-11-13T10:17:34.703

Link: CVE-2026-126298

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

No data.

Weaknesses