Deserialization of Untrusted Data Affecting transformers package, versions [,4.36.0)


0.0
high
0
10

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low
    User Interaction Required
    Confidentiality High
    Integrity High
    Availability High

    Threat Intelligence

    Exploit Maturity Proof of concept
    EPSS 0.06% (23rd percentile)
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NVD
7.8 high

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-PYTHON-TRANSFORMERS-6134594
  • published 21 Dec 2023
  • disclosed 20 Dec 2023
  • credit Peng Zhou

How to fix?

Upgrade transformers to version 4.36.0 or higher.

Overview

transformers is a State-of-the-art Machine Learning for JAX, PyTorch and TensorFlow

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Deserialization of Untrusted Data via the TransfoXLTokenizer() function, which can be called on a malicious vocab.pkl automatically. An attacker can bypass the import blacklist and other checks to cause such a file to be naively loaded via pickle.load in 3rd party users of an infected model.

Details

Serialization is a process of converting an object into a sequence of bytes which can be persisted to a disk or database or can be sent through streams. The reverse process of creating object from sequence of bytes is called deserialization. Serialization is commonly used for communication (sharing objects between multiple hosts) and persistence (store the object state in a file or a database). It is an integral part of popular protocols like Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Java Management Extension (JMX), Java Messaging System (JMS), Action Message Format (AMF), Java Server Faces (JSF) ViewState, etc.

Deserialization of untrusted data (CWE-502) is when the application deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid, thus allowing the attacker to control the state or the flow of the execution.

References