Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting tensorflow/tensorflow package, versions [2.3.0,2.3.4)[2.4.0,2.4.3)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.09% (39th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TENSORFLOWTENSORFLOW-2333357
  • published12 Jan 2022
  • disclosed12 Aug 2021
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 12 Aug 2021

CVE-2021-37686  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-835  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade tensorflow/tensorflow to version 2.3.4, 2.4.3 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. In affected versions the strided slice implementation in TFLite has a logic bug which can allow an attacker to trigger an infinite loop. This arises from newly introduced support for ellipsis in axis definition. An attacker can craft a model such that ellipsis_end_idx is smaller than i (e.g., always negative). In this case, the inner loop does not increase i and the continue statement causes execution to skip over the preincrement at the end of the outer loop. We have patched the issue in GitHub commit dfa22b348b70bb89d6d6ec0ff53973bacb4f4695. TensorFlow 2.6.0 is the only affected version.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

CVSS Scores

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