CVE-2021-29601: Integer overflow in TFLite concatentation

Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 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: 2021-05-14 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-190

Description

TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. The TFLite implementation of concatenation is vulnerable to an integer overflow issue(https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/7b7352a724b690b11bfaae2cd54bc3907daf6285/tensorflow/lite/kernels/concatenation.cc#L70-L76). An attacker can craft a model such that the dimensions of one of the concatenation input overflow the values of `int`. TFLite uses `int` to represent tensor dimensions, whereas TF uses `int64`. Hence, valid TF models can trigger an integer overflow when converted to TFLite format. 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.

Affected products

tensorflow: before 2.1.4; from 2.2.0 before 2.2.3; from 2.3.0 before 2.3.3; from 2.4.0 before 2.4.2 — fixed in 2.1.4, 2.2.3, 2.3.3, 2.4.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: tensorflow 2.1.4, 2.2.3, 2.3.3, 2.4.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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