CVE-2021-29583 Heap buffer overflow and undefined behavior in `FusedBatchNorm`

What is CVE-2021-29583?

CVE-2021-29583 is a low-severity memory corruption 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. The implementation of `tf.raw_ops.FusedBatchNorm` is vulnerable to a heap buffer overflow. If the tensors are empty, the same implementation can trigger undefined behavior by dereferencing null pointers. The implementation(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/57d86e0db5d1365f19adcce848dfc1bf89fdd4c7/tensorflow/core/kernels/fused_batch_norm_op.cc) fails to validate that `scale`, `offset`, `mean` and `variance` (the last two only when required) all have the same number of elements as the number of channels of `x`. This results in heap out of bounds reads when the buffers backing these tensors are indexed past their boundary. If the tensors are empty, the validation mentioned in the above paragraph would also trigger and prevent the undefined behavior. 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-125, CWE-476

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-29583?

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-2021-29583?

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

Upgrade to the fixed version. Memory-safe languages, compiler hardening and fuzzing prevent most new cases. More about Memory corruption.

Is CVE-2021-29583 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-29583 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-2021-29583, GHSA-9xh4-23q4-v6wr, PYSEC-2021-220, PYSEC-2021-511, PYSEC-2021-709.