What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-41215: Null pointer exception in `DeserializeSparse`

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 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: 2021-11-05 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-476

Description

TensorFlow is an open source platform for machine learning. In affected versions the shape inference code for `DeserializeSparse` can trigger a null pointer dereference. This is because the shape inference function assumes that the `serialize_sparse` tensor is a tensor with positive rank (and having `3` as the last dimension). The fix will be included in TensorFlow 2.7.0. We will also cherrypick this commit 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; 2.6.0 — fixed in 2.4.4, 2.5.2

How to fix

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

References

• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/d3738dd70f1c9ceb547258cbb82d853da8771850
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-x3v8-c8qx-3j3r
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/d3738dd70f1c9ceb547258cbb82d853da8771850
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-x3v8-c8qx-3j3r

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