CVE-2025-3264 Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in huggingface/transformers

Medium 5.3 Published Updated

Attackers can cause resource exhaustion and service disruption in Hugging Face Transformers via crafted input triggering catastrophic regex backtracking.

Exploited in the wild
Not known
Login needed
Not needed
Attackable
Over the internet
Victim action needed
Not needed
Fix
Available

What is CVE-2025-3264?

CVE-2025-3264 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in huggingface/transformers, published on 7 Jul 2025. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability was discovered in the Hugging Face Transformers library, specifically in the `get_imports()` function within `dynamic_module_utils.py`. This vulnerability affects versions 4.49.0 and is fixed in version 4.51.0. The issue arises from a regular expression pattern `\s*try\s*:.*?except.*?:` used to filter out try/except blocks from Python code, which can be exploited to cause excessive CPU consumption through crafted input strings due to catastrophic backtracking. This vulnerability can lead to remote code loading disruption, resource exhaustion in model serving, supply chain attack vectors, and development pipeline disruption.

Weakness: CWE-1333

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-3264?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including transformers. It affects 1 product.

PackageAffectedFixed in
transformers PyPIAll versions4.51.0
transformers PyPIAll versions4.51.0
transformers PyPIAll versions4.51.0

Products include Huggingface Transformers.

How do I fix CVE-2025-3264?

Upgrade transformers to 4.51.0 or later.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2025-3264 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2025-3264 exists.

Sources

Also known as GHSA-jjph-296x-mrcr, PYSEC-2026-1985.

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