- CVSS
- HIGH · 7.1v3.0CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:L
- Published
- 2026-08-02
- Weakness
- CWE-22
- Source
- nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-9856
Description
A vulnerability in huggingface/transformers versions <=5.8.0.dev0 allows an attacker to perform arbitrary file writes via path traversal. The issue resides in the save_pretrained() methods of PreTrainedTokenizerBase and ProcessorMixin, where keys from the chat_template dictionary are used directly as filenames without proper validation. An attacker can exploit this by publishing a malicious Hugging Face Hub repository with a crafted tokenizer_config.json file. When a victim downloads and saves the tokenizer or processor, the attacker-controlled keys can escape the intended save directory, enabling arbitrary file writes with attacker-controlled content. This vulnerability affects multiple processors inheriting from ProcessorMixin, including Idefics, Florence, Gemma, Phi, and Qwen-VL.
References
How GTK Cyber trains on this
AI security training at GTK Cyber covers the LLM and ML-pipeline vulnerability classes that vulnerabilities like CVE-2026-9856 fall into. Our hands-on courses are taught by Charles Givre and other practitioners who break and defend production AI systems.