Denial of Service (DoS) 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
high
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.08% (38th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TENSORFLOWTENSORFLOW-2333481
  • published12 Jan 2022
  • disclosed14 May 2021
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 14 May 2021

CVE-2021-29591  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-835  (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 Denial of Service (DoS). TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. TFlite graphs must not have loops between nodes. However, this condition was not checked and an attacker could craft models that would result in infinite loop during evaluation. In certain cases, the infinite loop would be replaced by stack overflow due to too many recursive calls. For example, the While implementation(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/106d8f4fb89335a2c52d7c895b7a7485465ca8d9/tensorflow/lite/kernels/while.cc) could be tricked into a scneario where both the body and the loop subgraphs are the same. Evaluating one of the subgraphs means calling the Eval function for the other and this quickly exhaust all stack space. 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. Please consult our security guide(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/SECURITY.md) for more information regarding the security model and how to contact us with issues and questions.

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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