Bug Report: Critical & High Vulnerabilities in HuggingFace Base Container Environment for TEI for tags cpu-1.6, cpu-1.7

[Sanjay-Prajapathi]

System Info

Summary

A recent security scan (BlackDuck) detected multiple CRITICAL and HIGH severity vulnerabilities in the HuggingFace base container environment.
These originate from outdated Debian 12 system packages such as glibc, libxml2, Berkeley DB, OpenSSL, etc.

Updating the base image and rebuilding dependent environments is recommended.

Affected Packages & Versions

Package	Version	Severity	Notes
GNU C Library (glibc)	2.36	CRITICAL	Multiple high-risk CVEs in libc6/libc-bin
libxml2	2.9.14	CRITICAL	XML parsing vulnerabilities
zlib	1.2.13	CRITICAL	Compression library CVE
Berkeley DB	5.3.28	HIGH	Many CVEs; deprecated upstream
elfutils	0.188	HIGH	ELF parsing and debugging tool vulnerabilities
GnuTLS	3.7.9	HIGH	TLS and certificate validation issues
nghttp2	1.52.0	HIGH	HTTP/2 protocol vulnerabilities
OpenSSL	3.0.15	HIGH	Security fixes available in newer releases
Perl	5.36.0	HIGH	Interpreter-level security issues
XZ Utils	5.4.1	HIGH	Compression library vulnerabilities

Impact

These vulnerabilities affect all downstream users relying on HuggingFace’s container environments or Spaces runtime.
Some of the CRITICAL vulnerabilities pose risks such as:

Remote code execution

Memory corruption

TLS/SSL weakening

XML parsing vulnerabilities

Compression library exploits

This may impact production deployments or regulated environments requiring security compliance.

Recommendations

Update the base Debian image to a patched version or newer release.

Run full upgrades during image build:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y

Rebuild and republish updated HuggingFace container images.

Introduce regular vulnerability scanning in CI/CD (Trivy, Grype, BlackDuck).

🌐 External References

Debian Security Tracker: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/

OpenSSL Vulnerabilities: https://www.openssl.org/news/vulnerabilities.html

NVD CVE Database: https://nvd.nist.gov/

Information

• Docker
• The CLI directly

Tasks

• An officially supported command
• My own modifications

Reproduction

Blackduck scan would get these reports for tei cpu images 1.6 and 1.7

Expected behavior

Please review and update the HuggingFace base container environment in upcoming releases to ensure security compliance and minimize risk for end users.