There has been a lot of research pointing out the security risks related to the use of Pickle file serialization (dubbed “Pickling” in the Hugging Face community). In fact, even Hugging Face’s documentation describes the risks of arbitrary code execution in Pickle files in detail.
In other words, there’s a known vulnerability, it’s documented, it’s ignored and now it’s been exploited twice.
Wow … shocked … is not a word I’d use to describe this situation.
Fuck around and see what happens … seems more apt.
Three years? The last time I used pickle was for a school project over a decade ago and even then these vulnerabilities were clearly laid out in the documentation, and it strongly advised against using it for any serious application. The only reason I kept using it in the project is precisely because it was a school project, and I knew the application would never be used in any production context worth attacking. Watching the ML community enthusiastically embrace pickle in the time since has been very amusing to say the least. Honestly I’m surprised it only seems to be catching up to them now.
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This is a direct quote from the article:
In other words, there’s a known vulnerability, it’s documented, it’s ignored and now it’s been exploited twice.
Wow … shocked … is not a word I’d use to describe this situation.
Fuck around and see what happens … seems more apt.
Twice that we know of.
Fair point.
We’ve known pickle files have been unsafe for like three years at this point and people are still using them?
Three years? The last time I used pickle was for a school project over a decade ago and even then these vulnerabilities were clearly laid out in the documentation, and it strongly advised against using it for any serious application. The only reason I kept using it in the project is precisely because it was a school project, and I knew the application would never be used in any production context worth attacking. Watching the ML community enthusiastically embrace pickle in the time since has been very amusing to say the least. Honestly I’m surprised it only seems to be catching up to them now.
Without reading the article, as a practicing AI Engineer here’s a couple of easy best practices: