Vulnerability record · CVE-2026-9856 · published 2 August 2026
CVE-2026-9856: Path traversal vulnerability
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.
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.
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:L
References
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Related vulnerabilities
Same products first, then exploited flaws of the same weakness class.
Source: NIST National Vulnerability Database (record CVE-2026-9856), CISA KEV, FIRST EPSS (scores of 2026-09-26). This page is refreshed as NVD updates the record.