Instituto Nacional de ciberseguridad. Sección Incibe
Instituto Nacional de Ciberseguridad. Sección INCIBE-CERT

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CVE-2026-78681

Severity CVSS v4.0:
HIGH
Type:
Unavailable / Other
Publication date:
25/08/2026
Last modified:
25/08/2026

Description

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.

Impact

Vector 4.0
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 CVSS v4.0 Severity and Metrics:

Base Score: 8.70 HIGH
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

Attack Vector (AV): Network
Attack Complexity (AC): Low
Attack Requirements (AT): None
Privileges Required (PR): None
User Interaction (UI): None
Confidentiality (VC): None
Integrity (VI): None
Availability (VA): High
Confidentiality (SC): None
Integrity (SI): None
Availability (SA): None

Base Score 4.0
8.70
Severity 4.0
HIGH
Vector 3.x
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H CVSS v3.1 Severity and Metrics:

Base Score: 7.50 HIGH
Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Attack Vector (AV): Network
Attack Complexity (AC): Low
Privileges Required (PR): None
User Interaction (UI): None
Scope (S): Unchanged
Confidentiality (C): None
Integrity (I): None
Availability (A): High

Base Score 3.x
7.50
Severity 3.x
HIGH

References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools