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CVE-2025-6921: Hugging Face Transformers vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in the AdamWeightDecay optimizer

September 23, 2025

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.

References

  • github.com/advisories/GHSA-4w7r-h757-3r74
  • github.com/huggingface/transformers
  • github.com/huggingface/transformers/commit/47c34fba5c303576560cb29767efb452ff12b8be
  • github.com/huggingface/transformers/commit/d37f7517972f67e3f2194c000ed0f87f064e5099
  • huntr.com/bounties/287d15a7-6e7c-45d2-8c05-11e305776f1f
  • nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-6921

Code Behaviors & Features

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Affected versions

All versions before 4.53.0

Fixed versions

  • 4.53.0

Solution

Upgrade to version 4.53.0 or above.

Impact 5.3 MEDIUM

CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Learn more about CVSS

Weakness

  • CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Source file

pypi/transformers/CVE-2025-6921.yml

Spotted a mistake? Edit the file on GitLab.

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