A Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability was discovered in the Hugging Face Transformers library, specifically in the get_configuration_file() function within the transformers.configuration_utils module. The affected version is 4.49.0, and the issue is resolved in version 4.51.0. The vulnerability arises from the use of a regular expression pattern config.(.*).json that can be exploited to cause excessive CPU consumption through crafted input strings, leading to catastrophic backtracking. This can result in model serving disruption, resource exhaustion, and increased latency in applications using the library.
The product uses a regular expression with an inefficient, possibly exponential worst-case computational complexity that consumes excessive CPU cycles.
Attackers can create crafted inputs that
intentionally cause the regular expression to use
excessive backtracking in a way that causes the CPU
consumption to spike.