NLTK: Uncontrolled resource consumption in RecursiveDescentParser via ambiguous or left-recursive grammars

Overview

nltk.parse.RecursiveDescentParser (and SteppingRecursiveDescentParser) enumerate parses top-down with no bound on the number of recursive steps. A small, crafted context-free grammar makes a short input consume unbounded CPU (and/or exhaust the Python recursion stack), pinning a process indefinitely — a denial of service.

Proof of concept

Both of the following hang on a 24-token input (killed after 8s; growth is super-linear in input length), on NLTK develop:

from nltk import CFG
from nltk.parse import RecursiveDescentParser

# (a) left recursion -> unbounded recursion
g = CFG.fromstring("S -> S S | 'a'")
list(RecursiveDescentParser(g).parse(["a"] * 24))   # hangs

# (b) ambiguous grammar -> exponential number of parses
g = CFG.fromstring("S -> 'a' S | 'a' S S | 'a'")
list(RecursiveDescentParser(g).parse(["a"] * 24))   # hangs

Impact

An application that runs RecursiveDescentParser on a grammar (or an input) drawn from an untrusted source can be driven into an unbounded CPU / stack-exhaustion loop by a tiny payload. No confidentiality or integrity impact; single-process availability only.

Sibling

The RegexpTokenizer ReDoS reported alongside this (CVE-2026-12875) is a different class (caller-supplied regex) and is addressed under GHSA-w3v8-gmh9-3wv7.

Affected packages

• nltk < 3.10.3

Remediation

Upgrade to a patched release:

• nltk 3.10.3