What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-3568: Arbitrary Code Execution via Deserialization in huggingface/transformers

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.6 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2024-04-10 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-502

Description

The huggingface/transformers library is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution through deserialization of untrusted data within the `load_repo_checkpoint()` function of the `TFPreTrainedModel()` class. Attackers can execute arbitrary code and commands by crafting a malicious serialized payload, exploiting the use of `pickle.load()` on data from potentially untrusted sources. This vulnerability allows for remote code execution (RCE) by deceiving victims into loading a seemingly harmless checkpoint during a normal training process, thereby enabling attackers to execute arbitrary code on the targeted machine.

Affected products

• huggingface/transformers: before 4.38.0 — fixed in 4.38.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: huggingface/transformers 4.38.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/commit/693667b8ac8138b83f8adb6522ddaf42fa07c125
• https://huntr.com/bounties/b3c36992-5264-4d7f-9906-a996efafba8f
• https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/commit/693667b8ac8138b83f8adb6522ddaf42fa07c125
• https://huntr.com/bounties/b3c36992-5264-4d7f-9906-a996efafba8f

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