CVE-2026-78681

NLTK versions before 3.10.3 use xml.etree.ElementTree to parse XML in multiple modules, which honors entity declarations in document DTDs. Attackers can craft XML payloads with nested entity declarations that expand from hundreds of bytes to megabytes in memory, causing denial of service.

Scoring

Severity
HIGH
CVSS base score
8.7
CVSS 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
EPSS probability
0.29%
CWE
CWE-776
Published
2026-08-25
Last modified
2026-08-26

Affected products

Weakness type

Related vulnerabilities

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