CVE-2021-29533 CHECK-fail in DrawBoundingBoxes

What is CVE-2021-29533?

CVE-2021-29533 is a low-severity denial of service vulnerability in Google Tensorflow, published on 14 May 2021. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

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.

Weakness: CWE-754

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-29533?

28 open source packages ship an affected version, including tensorflow, tensorflow-cpu and tensorflow-gpu. It affects 1 product.

Products include Google Tensorflow.

How do I fix CVE-2021-29533?

Upgrade tensorflow to a fixed version for your release line: 2.1.4, 2.2.3, 2.3.3 or 2.4.2.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2021-29533 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-29533 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Google Tensorflow

• CVE-2023-25668 TensorFlow vulnerable to heap out-of-buffer read in the QuantizeAndDequantize operation Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-7575 Integer Overflow or Wraparound in Google TensorFlow Critical 9.8
• CVE-2021-37678 Arbitrary code execution due to YAML deserialization Critical 9.3
• CVE-2021-35958 Path traversal in n/a Critical 9.1
• CVE-2020-15202 Integer truncation in Shard API usage Critical 9.0

All Google Tensorflow vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as BIT-tensorflow-2021-29533, GHSA-393f-2jr3-cp69, PYSEC-2021-170, PYSEC-2021-461, PYSEC-2021-659.