What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-21733: 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-190

Description

Tensorflow is an Open Source Machine Learning Framework. The implementation of `StringNGrams` can be used to trigger a denial of service attack by causing an out of memory condition after an integer overflow. We are missing a validation on `pad_witdh` and that result in computing a negative value for `ngram_width` which is later used to allocate parts of the output. 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/string_ngrams_op.cc#L29-L161
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/f68fdab93fb7f4ddb4eb438c8fe052753c9413e8
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-98j8-c9q4-r38g
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/5100e359aef5c8021f2e71c7b986420b85ce7b3d/tensorflow/core/kernels/string_ngrams_op.cc#L29-L161
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/f68fdab93fb7f4ddb4eb438c8fe052753c9413e8
• https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/security/advisories/GHSA-98j8-c9q4-r38g

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