CVE-2025-6921: Hugging Face Transformers vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in the AdamWeightDecay optimizer
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
Detect and mitigate CVE-2025-6921 with GitLab Dependency Scanning
Secure your software supply chain by verifying that all open source dependencies used in your projects contain no disclosed vulnerabilities. Learn more about Dependency Scanning →