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

CVSS 4.0 8.7 HIGHCVSS 3.1 7.5 HIGHCheck source for fixed versionsKEV status unknown

cve-program · CVE-2026-72818

Published

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.

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CVE-2026-72818 · CVE overview and exploitation status

cve-program · CVE-2026-72818

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Sources read 12 Nov 14:22 UTC · 274 of 275 readable · 272 fully read · documentation 469/469 current