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.
What this means for your business
- An attacker can use it remotely, over a network, without a login, but only after tricking someone into an action such as opening a file or a link.
- FIRST's prediction model gives it a 0.3% chance of attack attempts being seen in the next 30 days, ranking above 24% of all known flaws.
What to do
- 1Ask your IT team or provider whether any of your systems use the affected product.
- 2If you do, follow the vendor's guidance. No patch reference has been published yet.
Not sure if your company is exposed?
Fastnexa’s certified penetration testers can check whether attackers could use this flaw, or others like it, against your websites, apps and network. The full test is free for our first 10 founding clients until 31 December 2026.
Scoring
- CVSS
- 6.5 (v3.1)
- Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H- CVSS v4
- 7.1
- Weakness
- CWE-787
- Assigned by
- disclosure@vulncheck.com
Dates
- Published
- 2026-09-04
- Last modified
- 2026-09-04
- Sources
- NVD
References
- https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers
- https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/blob/v0.23.2/tokenizers/src/models/bpe/model.rs
- https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/issues/2094
- https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/tokenizers-bpebuilder-buffer-overflow-via-merge-token
- https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/issues/2094