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.
Weakness
The product uses a regular expression with a worst-case computational complexity that is inefficient and possibly exponential.
Potential Mitigations
Related Attack Patterns
References
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk/blob/3.9.4/nltk/tokenize/casual.py
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk/issues/3704
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk/releases/tag/v3.10.1
- https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/nltk-tweettokenizer-url-pattern-backtracks-catastrophically-on-naked-domain-like-input
- https://github.com/nltk/nltk/issues/3704