What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-15204: Segfault in Tensorflow

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2020-09-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-476

Description

In eager mode, TensorFlow before versions 1.15.4, 2.0.3, 2.1.2, 2.2.1 and 2.3.1 does not set the session state. Hence, calling `tf.raw_ops.GetSessionHandle` or `tf.raw_ops.GetSessionHandleV2` results in a null pointer dereference In linked snippet, in eager mode, `ctx->session_state()` returns `nullptr`. Since code immediately dereferences this, we get a segmentation fault. The issue is patched in commit 9a133d73ae4b4664d22bd1aa6d654fec13c52ee1, 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/9a133d73ae4b4664d22bd1aa6d654fec13c52ee1
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/releases/tag/v2.3.1
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-q8gv-q7wr-9jf8
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-10/msg00065.html
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/9a133d73ae4b4664d22bd1aa6d654fec13c52ee1
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/releases/tag/v2.3.1
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-q8gv-q7wr-9jf8

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