GHSA-2jhm-w3mp-jcwr

NLTK network URL validation permits SSRF to RFC 6598 shared-address-space hosts

At a glance

Published
Updated
CVE
CVE-2026-12372
Aliases
PYSEC-2026-3955
CVSS_V3
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N

Description

A Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability exists in nltk/nltk versions 3.9.4 and the current develop branch. The `nltk.pathsec.validate_network_url()` function, intended to prevent SSRF by rejecting internal network addresses, fails to reject IPs in the RFC 6598 shared address space (`100.64.0.0/10`). This occurs because Python's `ipaddress` module does not classify such addresses as `is_private` or `is_global`, and the current guard only checks `is_private` and a few explicit categories. An attacker who can influence a URL passed to NLTK's network-loading helpers can exploit this vulnerability to make a strict-mode application send requests to shared-address-space hosts, potentially exposing non-public infrastructure reachable from the application host. The impact is limited to SSRF-style confidentiality exposure, with no code execution claimed.

Affected packages

PackageVersions
PyPI · nltkintroduced 0, fixed 3.10.0

References

Sources

SourceLicence
OSV.devCC-BY 4.0 — GitHub Advisory Database