TensorFlow — Vulnerability (CVE-2021-29609)
Date: 2021-05
Affected: google/tensorflow
Attack vector: dos
Category: vulnerability-disclosure
Severity: Medium
CVE: CVE-2021-29609
CWE: CWE-476
CWE-665
CWE-787
CVSS: 5.3 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H)

TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. Incomplete validation in `SparseAdd` results in allowing attackers to exploit undefined behavior (dereferencing null pointers) as well as write outside of bounds of heap allocated data. The implementation(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/656e7673b14acd7835dc778867f84916c6d1cac2/tensorflow/core/kernels/sparse_add_op.cc) has a large set of validation for the two sparse tensor inputs (6 tensors in total), but does not validate that the tensors are not empty or that the second dimension of `*_indices` matches the size of corresponding `*_shape`. This allows attackers to send tensor triples that represent invalid sparse tensors to abuse code assumptions that are not protected by validation. The fix will be included in TensorFlow 2.5.0. We will also cherrypick this commit on TensorFlow 2.4.2, TensorFlow 2.3.3, TensorFlow 2.2.3 and TensorFlow 2.1.4, as these are also affected and still in supported range.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):