CVE-2026-12243
NLTK version 3.9.4 is vulnerable to a path traversal attack due to an incomplete fix for GitHub Issue #3504. The `_UNSAFE_NO_PROTOCOL_RE` regex in `nltk/data.py` checks for literal `../` sequences but fails to account for percent-encoded traversal sequences such as `..%2f`. The `url2pathname()` function decodes these sequences after the validation step, allowing an attacker to bypass the protection. This vulnerability enables an attacker to read arbitrary files accessible to the Python process by controlling the resource name parameter passed to `nltk.data.load()` or `nltk.data.find()`. The issue affects applications that rely on NLTK for resource loading, including NLP web applications, Jupyter notebooks, and CLI tools. The default `pathsec.ENFORCE=False` setting exacerbates the impact by not blocking the file read at the `open()` stage.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can read sensitive data.
- Weakness
- An attacker-supplied file path is not confined, letting them read or write outside the intended folder.
- Likelihood
- Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.
What to doFold into the next patch cycle. Start with the instances exposed to the internet.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.