CVE-2025-6921: Hugging Face Transformers vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in the AdamWeightDecay optimizer
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 douseweightdecay method, which processes user-controlled regular expressions in the includeinweightdecay and excludefromweightdecay lists.
Published Sep 23, 2025
Affected packages
transformers
- Ecosystem
- PyPI
- Affected
- < 4.53.0
- Fixed in
- 4.53.0
- Check
pip show transformers
Advisory details
From the GitHub Advisory Database (CC BY 4.0).
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.
References
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-6921
- https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/commit/47c34fba5c303576560cb29767efb452ff12b8be
- https://huntr.com/bounties/287d15a7-6e7c-45d2-8c05-11e305776f1f
- https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/commit/d37f7517972f67e3f2194c000ed0f87f064e5099
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-4w7r-h757-3r74
How this page is made: the data panel comes from the GitHub Advisory Database, CISA’s KEV catalog, the NVD and FIRST EPSS, and updates twice a day. No analysis has been written for this entry yet. Methodology
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