Answer in brief
CVE-2026-72818 records a Unknown severity vulnerability in NLTK TweetTokenizer URL Pattern Backtracks Catastrophically on Naked-Domain-Like Input. The current sources do not mark it as known exploited. The current feed maps nltk/nltk (generic). Check affected ranges and fixed versions before updating.
Analysis pending evidence review
HOL Guard separates source facts from reviewed analysis. See the methodology.
A CVSS score is not reported in the current record. The current sources do not mark it as known exploited. Treat this as a source-backed prioritization signal, not a statement about your environment.
Analysis status
Analysis pending evidence review
Factual feed record only; HOL analysis is not approved for indexing. Read the methodology.
The current feed maps nltk/nltk (generic). Check affected ranges and fixed versions before updating.
| Package | Affected range | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| nltk/nltkgeneric | >=0 <3.10.1 | 3.10.1 |
Published upstream
Aug 20, 2026
Evidence: source:cvelist:source_dates:source-dates:recordSource modified
Aug 20, 2026
Evidence: source:cvelist:source_dates:source-dates:recordFirst seen by HOL
Aug 20, 2026
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.
Quoted source text, attributed separately from HOL analysis.