What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-58198: ChatterBot: Symlink-Following Arbitrary Write via UbuntuCorpusTrainer

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-07-09 · updated 2026-10-25
• Weakness: CWE-59

Description

ChatterBot is a machine learning, conversational dialog engine for creating chat bots. Prior to 1.2.14, UbuntuCorpusTrainer.extract() uses a predictable home-rooted output directory (~/ubuntu_data/ubuntu_dialogs) with a check-then-create pattern followed by tar.extractall(path=self.data_path), allowing a local attacker who pre-plants a symlink at the predictable path to cause archive contents to be written through the symlink to an attacker-chosen directory. This issue is fixed in version 1.2.14.

Affected products

• gunthercox ChatterBot: before 1.2.14

References

• https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/commit/82817b5c28bfd43e682b991bcc76e6f780726dbf
• https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/pull/2445
• https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/releases/tag/1.2.14
• https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/security/advisories/GHSA-wvrh-2f4m-924v
• https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/security/advisories/GHSA-wvrh-2f4m-924v

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