Medium severity · published Sep 4, 2026
CVE-2026-85670
tokenizers BpeBuilder Buffer Overflow via merge token
6.5
CVSS
0.5%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
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.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
Required
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.5% · higher than 40% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
TO
tokenizers · huggingface
through 0.23.2 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-85670
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-85670
github.com
https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers
github.com
https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/blob/v0.23.2/tokenizers/src/models/bpe/model.rs
github.com
https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/issues/2094
www.vulncheck.com
https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/tokenizers-bpebuilder-buffer-overflow-via-merge-token
