What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-1945: picklescan - Zip Flag Bit Exploit Crashes Picklescan But Not PyTorch

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2025-03-10 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-345

Description

picklescan before 0.0.23 fails to detect malicious pickle files inside PyTorch model archives when certain ZIP file flag bits are modified. By flipping specific bits in the ZIP file headers, an attacker can embed malicious pickle files that remain undetected by PickleScan while still being successfully loaded by PyTorch's torch.load(). This can lead to arbitrary code execution when loading a compromised model.

Affected products

• picklescan: before 0.0.23 — fixed in 0.0.23

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: picklescan 0.0.23. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/mmaitre314/picklescan/commit/e58e45e0d9e091159c1554f9b04828bbb40b9781
• https://github.com/mmaitre314/picklescan/security/advisories/GHSA-w8jq-xcqf-f792
• https://www.sonatype.com/security-advisories/cve-2025-1945

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