Model Namespace Reuse: An AI Supply-Chain Attack Exploiting Model Name Trust


Palo Alto Unit 42 research uncovered a fundamental flaw in the AI supply chain that allows attackers to gain Remote Code Execution (RCE) and additional capabilities on major platforms like Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry, Google’s Vertex AI and thousands of open-source projects. We refer to this issue as Model Namespace Reuse.

Hugging Face is a platform that enables AI developers to build, share and deploy models and datasets. On that platform, namespaces are the identifiers of models, which are Git repositories that are stored on the Hugging Face hub. Hugging Face models contain configurations, weights, code and information to enable developers to use the models.

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Source: Palo Alto Unit 42


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