TensorFlow — Vulnerability (CVE-2021-29541)
Date: 2021-05
Affected: google/tensorflow
Attack vector: dos
Category: vulnerability-disclosure
Severity: Low
CVE: CVE-2021-29541
CVE-2021-29542
CWE: CWE-131
CWE-476
CWE-787
CVSS: 2.5 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L)

TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. An attacker can trigger a dereference of a null pointer in `tf.raw_ops.StringNGrams`. This is because the implementation(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/1cdd4da14282210cc759e468d9781741ac7d01bf/tensorflow/core/kernels/string_ngrams_op.cc#L67-L74) does not fully validate the `data_splits` argument. This would result in `ngrams_data`(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/1cdd4da14282210cc759e468d9781741ac7d01bf/tensorflow/core/kernels/string_ngrams_op.cc#L106-L110) to be a null pointer when the output would be computed to have 0 or negative size. Later writes to the output tensor would then cause a null pointer dereference. 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):