CVE-2020-26271: Heap out of bounds access in MakeEdge in TensorFlow

Severity: low (CVSS 3.3 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2020-12-10 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-125

Description

In affected versions of TensorFlow under certain cases, loading a saved model can result in accessing uninitialized memory while building the computation graph. The MakeEdge function creates an edge between one output tensor of the src node (given by output_index) and the input slot of the dst node (given by input_index). This is only possible if the types of the tensors on both sides coincide, so the function begins by obtaining the corresponding DataType values and comparing these for equality. However, there is no check that the indices point to inside of the arrays they index into. Thus, this can result in accessing data out of bounds of the corresponding heap allocated arrays. In most scenarios, this can manifest as unitialized data access, but if the index points far away from the boundaries of the arrays this can be used to leak addresses from the library. This is fixed in versions 1.15.5, 2.0.4, 2.1.3, 2.2.2, 2.3.2, and 2.4.0.

Affected products

tensorflow: before 1.15.5; from 2.0.0 before 2.0.4; from 2.1.0 before 2.1.3; from 2.2.0 before 2.2.2; from 2.3.0 before 2.3.2 — fixed in 1.15.5, 2.0.4, 2.1.3, 2.2.2, 2.3.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: tensorflow 1.15.5, 2.0.4, 2.1.3, 2.2.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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