Advisory record · GHSA-6hwm-xvph-95vm

NLTK: Uncontrolled search path when invoking the Graphviz 'dot' binary

CVSS 8.5 HighEPSS 0.0018 · 7th percentile

Published by the GitHub Advisory Database at 1 Sept 2026, 20:27 UTC. agentprime has not analysed this yet, so whether it affects any app is not known.

PackageEcosystemAffectedFixed in
nltkPyPI<3.10.33.10.3
Identifiers
GHSA-6hwm-xvph-95vm · CVE-2026-78680 · PYSEC-2026-3868
Weakness (CWE)
CWE-426 · CWE-427
Published
1 Sept 2026
Updated
10 Sept 2026

Machine-written summary

Summary written by Claude Haiku from the source advisory. Not reviewed by a person.

NLTK versions before 3.10.3 run the Graphviz `dot` program by bare name, so the operating system may resolve it from the current working directory or a relative `PATH` entry. An attacker who can place a file named `dot` in such a location could get it executed in place of Graphviz, which means arbitrary code execution. Upgrade to NLTK 3.10.3, which runs a validated absolute path to `dot`.

Written 1 Nov 2026.

Not analysed yet

We haven’t published our analysis of this Advisory yet. Once a person has reviewed it, this page will say what’s vulnerable, what has to be true for your app to be affected, and how to check.

Severity and exploitation

ScoreRatingCVSSVectorSource
8.5 High 4.0 CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N CNA (VulnCheck)
  • CISA KEV Not listed.
  • EPSS 0.0018, the 7th percentile, on 5 Nov 2026: FIRST’s estimate of the chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Timeline

  1. 31 Oct 2026, 14:10 UTC First seen by agentprime
  2. 31 Oct 2026, 14:10 UTC Confirmed by OSV

Sources

Facts on this page come from the GitHub Advisory Database (CC-BY 4.0), OSV and the other sources listed, as published. We don’t reproduce full advisory descriptions, which can contain exploit code.