What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-15194: Denial of Service in Tensorflow

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2020-09-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

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."

Affected products

• tensorflow: before 1.15.4; from 2.0.0 before 2.0.3; from 2.1.0 before 2.1.2; from 2.2.0 before 2.2.1; from 2.3.0 before 2.3.1 — fixed in 1.15.4, 2.0.3, 2.1.2, 2.2.1, 2.3.1
• openSUSE Leap: 15.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: tensorflow 1.15.4, 2.0.3, 2.1.2, 2.2.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-10/msg00065.html
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/390611e0d45c5793c7066110af37c8514e6a6c54
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/releases/tag/v2.3.1
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-9mqp-7v2h-2382
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-10/msg00065.html
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/390611e0d45c5793c7066110af37c8514e6a6c54
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/releases/tag/v2.3.1
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-9mqp-7v2h-2382

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