Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Affecting tensorflow/tensorflow package, versions [,2.1.4)[2.2.0,2.2.3)[2.3.0,2.3.3)[2.4.0,2.4.2)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.04% (16th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TENSORFLOWTENSORFLOW-2333356
  • published12 Jan 2022
  • disclosed14 May 2021
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 14 May 2021

CVE-2021-29531  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-754  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade tensorflow/tensorflow to version 2.1.4, 2.2.3, 2.3.3, 2.4.2 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions. TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. An attacker can trigger a CHECK fail in PNG encoding by providing an empty input tensor as the pixel data. This is because the implementation(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/e312e0791ce486a80c9d23110841525c6f7c3289/tensorflow/core/kernels/image/encode_png_op.cc#L57-L60) only validates that the total number of pixels in the image does not overflow. Thus, an attacker can send an empty matrix for encoding. However, if the tensor is empty, then the associated buffer is nullptr. Hence, when calling png::WriteImageToBuffer(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/e312e0791ce486a80c9d23110841525c6f7c3289/tensorflow/core/kernels/image/encode_png_op.cc#L79-L93), the first argument (i.e., image.flat<T>().data()) is NULL. This then triggers the CHECK_NOTNULL in the first line of png::WriteImageToBuffer(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/e312e0791ce486a80c9d23110841525c6f7c3289/tensorflow/core/lib/png/png_io.cc#L345-L349). Since image is null, this results in abort being called after printing the stacktrace. Effectively, this allows an attacker to mount a denial of service attack. 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.

CVSS Scores

version 3.1