What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-21732: Memory exhaustion in Tensorflow

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2022-02-03 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-770

Description

Tensorflow is an Open Source Machine Learning Framework. The implementation of `ThreadPoolHandle` can be used to trigger a denial of service attack by allocating too much memory. This is because the `num_threads` argument is only checked to not be negative, but there is no upper bound on its value. The fix will be included in TensorFlow 2.8.0. We will also cherrypick this commit on TensorFlow 2.7.1, TensorFlow 2.6.3, and TensorFlow 2.5.3, as these are also affected and still in supported range.

Affected products

• tensorflow: through 2.5.2; from 2.6.0 through 2.6.2; 2.7.0

References

• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/5100e359aef5c8021f2e71c7b986420b85ce7b3d/tensorflow/core/kernels/data/experimental/threadpool_dataset_op.cc#L79-L135
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/e3749a6d5d1e8d11806d4a2e9cc3123d1a90b75e
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-c582-c96p-r5cq
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/5100e359aef5c8021f2e71c7b986420b85ce7b3d/tensorflow/core/kernels/data/experimental/threadpool_dataset_op.cc#L79-L135
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/e3749a6d5d1e8d11806d4a2e9cc3123d1a90b75e
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-c582-c96p-r5cq

Get alerted when CVE-2022-21732 or the next vulnerability affects your stack