CVE-2025-24357: vLLM allows a malicious model RCE by torch.load in hf_model_weights_iterator

Description The vllm/modelexecutor/weightutils.py implements hfmodelweightsiterator to load the model checkpoint, which is downloaded from huggingface. It use torch.load function and weightsonly parameter is default value False. There is a security warning on https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.load.html, when torch.load load a malicious pickle data it will execute arbitrary code during unpickling.

Impact This vulnerability can be exploited to execute arbitrary codes and OS commands in the victim machine who fetch the pretrained repo remotely.

Note that most models now use the safetensors format, which is not vulnerable to this issue.

References https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.load.html Fix: https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/12366