What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-41203: Missing validation during checkpoint loading

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 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: none known
• Published: 2021-11-05 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-345

Description

TensorFlow is an open source platform for machine learning. In affected versions an attacker can trigger undefined behavior, integer overflows, segfaults and `CHECK`-fail crashes if they can change saved checkpoints from outside of TensorFlow. This is because the checkpoints loading infrastructure is missing validation for invalid file formats. The fixes will be included in TensorFlow 2.7.0. We will also cherrypick these commits on TensorFlow 2.6.1, TensorFlow 2.5.2, and TensorFlow 2.4.4, as these are also affected and still in supported range.

Affected products

• tensorflow: before 2.4.4; from 2.5.0 before 2.5.2; from 2.6.0 before 2.6.1 — fixed in 2.4.4, 2.5.2, 2.6.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: tensorflow 2.4.4, 2.5.2, 2.6.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/368af875869a204b4ac552b9ddda59f6a46a56ec
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/abcced051cb1bd8fb05046ac3b6023a7ebcc4578
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/b619c6f865715ca3b15ef1842b5b95edbaa710ad
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/e8dc63704c88007ee4713076605c90188d66f3d2
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-7pxj-m4jf-r6h2
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/368af875869a204b4ac552b9ddda59f6a46a56ec
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/abcced051cb1bd8fb05046ac3b6023a7ebcc4578
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/b619c6f865715ca3b15ef1842b5b95edbaa710ad
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/e8dc63704c88007ee4713076605c90188d66f3d2
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-7pxj-m4jf-r6h2

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