CVE-2025-6921
Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in huggingface/transformers
- Published
- Updated
- Reserved
- Assigned by
- @huntr_ai
Description
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.
Public exploit
An exploit or proof of concept is public: anyone can try it against an unpatched system. CISA's SSVC rates its exploitation: a proof of concept is public.
Timeline
ID reserved
By @huntr_ai
- 3 months later
· 3 months later
Published
Changes after publication (a new score, a public exploit, EPSS crossing 1, 10 or 50 %, leaving KEV) are kept since November 2026; earlier ones are not known.
Scores
| Scored by | CVSS | Score | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| @huntr_aiCNA (assigner) | 3.0 | Medium5.3 | CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L |
| NVDNVD · Analyzed | 3.1 | High7.5 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H |
- EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)
- 0.51% · top 56% of all CVEs (7 Nov 2026)
- CISA SSVC
- Exploitation: poc · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial
The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: Medium 5.3.
Weakness
Affected products
huggingface · huggingface/transformers
- affected unspecified – < 4.53.0
Affected packages
From reviewed advisories of the GitHub Advisory Database.
- PyPItransformersGHSA-4w7r-h757-3r74 (opens in a new tab)
References (2)
Sources
The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.
- CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
- CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
- NVD (opens in a new tab)
- FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
- OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub Advisory GHSA-4w7r-h757-3r74 (opens in a new tab)
- CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)
Badge for a README or a ticket
[](https://trackcve.app/cve/CVE-2025-6921)Record last updated .