ONNX Untrusted Model Repository Warnings Suppressed by silent=True in onnx.hub.load() — Silent Supply-Chain Attack

What's the issue

Passing silent=True to onnx.hub.load() kills all trust warnings and user prompts. This means a model can be downloaded from any unverified GitHub repo with zero user awareness.

if not _verify_repo_ref(repo) and not silent:
    # completely skipped when silent=True
    print("The model repo... is not trusted")
    if input().lower() != "y":
        return None

On top of that, the SHA256 integrity check is useless here — it validates against a manifest that lives in the same repo the attacker controls, so the hash will always match.

Impact

Any pipeline using hub.load() with silent=True and an external repo string is silently loading whatever the repo owner ships. If that model executes arbitrary code on load, the attacker has access to the machine.

Resolved by removing the feature

References

• Write-up