GHSA-4w7r-h757-3r74MediumCVSS 5.3

Hugging Face Transformers vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in the AdamWeightDecay optimizer

Published
September 23, 2025
Last Modified
September 23, 2025

🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)

📋 Description

The huggingface/transformers library, versions prior to 4.53.0, is vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in the AdamWeightDecay optimizer. The vulnerability arises from the _do_use_weight_decay method, which processes user-controlled regular expressions in the include_in_weight_decay and exclude_from_weight_decay lists. Malicious regular expressions can cause catastrophic backtracking during the re.search call, leading to 100% CPU utilization and a denial of service. This issue can be exploited by attackers who can control the patterns in these lists, potentially causing the machine learning task to hang and rendering services unresponsive.

🎯 Affected products1

  • pip/transformers:< 4.53.0

🔗 References (5)