Buffer overflow in Huggingface Tokenizers
CVE-2026-85670
tokenizers (Hugging Face) is affected by an out-of-bounds buffer access in BpeBuilder::build (tokenizers/src/models/bpe/model.rs). When loading a tokenizer.json via Tokenizer::from_file/from_str, the builder sizes a scratch buffer to the longest vocabulary key, then writes each concatenated merge rule into it. A merge whose concatenated token exceeds the longest vocabulary key overruns the buffer, which Rust turns into a panic that aborts the process in Rust and FFI embeddings. This occurs at load time with no encoding required, so an attacker who supplies a crafted tokenizer.json can cause a denial of service. A secondary defect at the same location can cause a usize underflow (panic in debug, potential memory corruption in release) when continuing_subword_prefix is set and a merge token is shorter than the prefix. Observed in version 0.23.1.
Vulnerability class: Buffer Overflow
Published · last modified .
CVSS v3 metric
CVSS v3 base score 6.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.
EPSS exploit prediction
EPSS: 0.005 (39.1th percentile), scored .
Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 39th percentile — 39.1% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.
EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.003 · newest: 0.005 · change: +0.002
Affected products
Weakness classification (CWE)
References
- github.com/huggingface/tokenizers (product)
- github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/blob/v0.23.2/tokenizers/src/models/bpe/model… (technical-description)
- github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/issues/2094 (issue-tracking)
- www.vulncheck.com/advisories/tokenizers-bpebuilder-buffer-overflow-via-merge-to… (third-party-advisory)
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2026-85670?
- CVE-2026-85670 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Huggingface Tokenizers, classified under Out-of-bounds Write. CVSS score: 6.5/10. Published 2026-09-04.
- How severe is CVE-2026-85670?
- Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.5 out of 10.