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Fencer Intel
medium 5.3

CVE-2025-3933 json

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in huggingface/transformers

published last yr. modified last mo. also GHSA-37mw-44qp-f5jm , PYSEC-2026-1977 , EUVD-2025-21126

cvss
5.3
version 3.0, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.5%
EPSS 0.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 42%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerability was discovered in the Hugging Face Transformers library, specifically within the DonutProcessor class's `token2json()` method. This vulnerability affects versions 4.50.3 and earlier, and is fixed in version 4.52.1. The issue arises from the regex pattern `<s_(.*?)>` which can be exploited to cause excessive CPU consumption through crafted input strings due to catastrophic backtracking. This vulnerability can lead to service disruption, resource exhaustion, and potential API service vulnerabilities, impacting document processing tasks using the Donut model.

Patch / fix

  • pypi transformers 4.52.1
  • huggingface huggingface/transformers 4.52.1

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2025-3933 updated cvss 5.3

transformers: Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in huggingface/transformers

  • Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed openshift-lightspeed/lightspeed-service-api-rhel9, openshift-lightspeed-tech-preview/lightspeed-rag-tool-rhel9 Red Hat AI Inference Server rhaiis/vllm-cuda-rhel9, rhaiis/vllm-rocm-rhel9 Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 ansible-automation-platform-24/de-minimal-rhel8, ansible-automation-platform-24/de-minimal-rhel9, ansible-automation-platform-25/de-minimal-rhel8, ansible-automation-platform-25/de-minimal-rhel9, ansible-automation-platform-24/ee-supported-rhel8, ansible-automation-platform-24/ee-supported-rhel9, +5 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) rhelai1/gemma-2-9b-it, rhelai1/bootc-amd-rhel9, rhelai1/bootc-intel-rhel9, rhelai1/gemma-2-9b-it-fp8, rhelai1/skills-adapter-v3, rhelai1/bootc-nvidia-rhel9, +24 more Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) rhoai/odh-mm-rest-proxy-rhel9, rhoai/odh-model-registry-rhel9, rhoai/odh-kueue-controller-rhel9, rhoai/odh-mlmd-grpc-server-rhel9, rhoai/odh-training-operator-rhel8, rhoai/odh-training-operator-rhel9, +9 more
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
last yr.

Exploit prediction

0.50% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 42% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • huntr.com https://huntr.com/bounties/25282953-5827-4384-bb6f-5790d275721b referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.0 5.3 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
NVD 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
GitHub 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
OSV 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
pypi transformers
<4.52.1
4.52.1

Affected products

  • huggingface huggingface/transformers

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-1333 Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.