A critical remote code execution vulnerability exists in all versions of the HuggingFace transformers library prior to version 5.3.0. The vulnerability allows an attacker to craft a malicious config.json file containing the _attn_implementation_internal field set to an attacker-controlled HuggingFace Hub repository ID. When a victim loads this model using the standard AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained() API, the library downloads and executes arbitrary Python code from the attackers repository with the victims full OS privileges. This issue arises due to unfiltered deserialization of configuration attributes, insufficient sanitization of internal fields, and unsandboxed execution of downloaded kernels. The vulnerability bypasses the trust_remote_code security mechanism, is invisible to the victim, and exploits the standard documented usage pattern, making it particularly severe. Users are advised to upgrade to version 5.3.0 or later to mitigate this issue.
Weakness
The product contains a serializable data element that does not have an associated serialization method.
Affected Software
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transformers | Huggingface | * | 5.3.0 (excluding) |