CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-37674 — 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. In affected versions an attacker can trigger a denial of service via a segmentation fault in `tf.raw_ops.MaxPoolGrad` caused by missing validation. The [implementation](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/460e000de3a83278fb00b61a16d161b1964f15f4/tensorflow/core/kernels/maxpooling_op.cc) misses some validation for the `orig_input` and `orig_output` tensors. The fixes for CVE-2021-29579 were incomplete. We have patched the issue in GitHub commit 136b51f10903e044308cf77117c0ed9871350475. The fix will be included in TensorFlow 2.6.0. We will also cherrypick this commit on TensorFlow 2.5.1, TensorFlow 2.4.3, and TensorFlow 2.3.4, as these are also affected and still in supported range.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-08-12
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20, CWE-1284

Affected products

  • google / tensorflow
  • google / tensorflow / 2.5.0
  • google / tensorflow / 2.6.0

Showing 3 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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