CVE-2019-14751 NLTK Vulnerable To Path Traversal

What is CVE-2019-14751?

CVE-2019-14751 is a high-severity path traversal vulnerability in n/a, published on 22 Aug 2019. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

NLTK Downloader before 3.4.5 is vulnerable to a directory traversal, allowing attackers to write arbitrary files via a ../ (dot dot slash) in an NLTK package (ZIP archive) that is mishandled during extraction.

Weakness: CWE-22

Which versions are affected by CVE-2019-14751?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including nltk. It affects 1 product.

Products include Nltk Nltk.

How do I fix CVE-2019-14751?

Upgrade nltk to 3.4.5 or later.

Upgrade, and resolve every user-supplied path against an allowed base folder before opening it. More about Path traversal.

Is CVE-2019-14751 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2019-14751 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Public exploit code: 1 proofs of concept on GitHub.

Other vulnerabilities in n/a

• CVE-2026-0848 Arbitrary Code Execution in NLTK StanfordSegmenter via Untrusted JAR Loading Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-14009 Zip Slip Vulnerability in nltk/nltk Leading to Remote Code Execution Critical 10.0
• CVE-2026-78683 NLTK before 3.10.0 Remote Code Execution via Unsafe Pickle Deserialization Critical 9.4
• CVE-2026-79657 NLTK before 3.10.3 Remote Code Execution via Unsafe Pickle Deserialization Critical 9.3
• CVE-2026-79675 NLTK before 3.10.3 JVM Argument Injection via Per-Call Options Critical 9.3

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2019-14751, GHSA-mr7p-25v2-35wr, MGASA-2020-0160, PYSEC-2019-106, UBUNTU-CVE-2019-14751, USN-4106-1 and 3 more.