CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-29533 — TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning

Medium CVSS 5.5

TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. An attacker can trigger a denial of service via a `CHECK` failure by passing an empty image to `tf.raw_ops.DrawBoundingBoxes`. This is because the implementation(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/ea34a18dc3f5c8d80a40ccca1404f343b5d55f91/tensorflow/core/kernels/image/draw_bounding_box_op.cc#L148-L165) uses `CHECK_*` assertions instead of `OP_REQUIRES` to validate user controlled inputs. Whereas `OP_REQUIRES` allows returning an error condition back to the user, the `CHECK_*` macros result in a crash if the condition is false, similar to `assert`. In this case, `height` is 0 from the `images` input. This results in `max_box_row_clamp` being negative and the assertion being falsified, followed by aborting program execution. 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.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-05-14
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-754

Affected products

  • google / tensorflow

Showing 1 representative product identities from 4 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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