CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-15194 — Google Tensorflow security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.3

In Tensorflow before versions 1.15.4, 2.0.3, 2.1.2, 2.2.1 and 2.3.1, the `SparseFillEmptyRowsGrad` implementation has incomplete validation of the shapes of its arguments. Although `reverse_index_map_t` and `grad_values_t` are accessed in a similar pattern, only `reverse_index_map_t` is validated to be of proper shape. Hence, malicious users can pass a bad `grad_values_t` to trigger an assertion failure in `vec`, causing denial of service in serving installations. The issue is patched in commit 390611e0d45c5793c7066110af37c8514e6a6c54, and is released in TensorFlow versions 1.15.4, 2.0.3, 2.1.2, 2.2.1, or 2.3.1."

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2020-09-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20, CWE-617

Affected products

  • google / tensorflow
  • opensuse / leap / 15.2

Showing 2 representative product identities from 6 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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