CVE-2021-37678 - CVE House
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Status published Critical CVE-2021-37678

Arbitrary code execution due to YAML deserialization

Vulnerability Description

TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. In affected versions TensorFlow and Keras can be tricked to perform arbitrary code execution when deserializing a Keras model from YAML format. The [implementation](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/460e000de3a83278fb00b61a16d161b1964f15f4/tensorflow/python/keras/saving/model_config.py#L66-L104) uses `yaml.unsafe_load` which can perform arbitrary code execution on the input. Given that YAML format support requires a significant amount of work, we have removed it for now. We have patched the issue in GitHub commit 23d6383eb6c14084a8fc3bdf164043b974818012. The fix will be included in TensorFlow 2.6.0. We will also cherrypick this commit on TensorFlow 2.5.1, TensorFlow 2.4.3, and TensorFlow 2.3.4, as these are also affected and still in supported range.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

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Credits & Attribution

No credits recorded in the NVD database.

References

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Affected Vendor

Affected Software

tensorflow
Vulnerable Versions:
>= 2.5.0, < 2.5.1, >= 2.4.0, < 2.4.3, < 2.3.4

Timeline

Official Publish: August 12th, 2021
Last Modified: August 4th, 2024
Added to House: July 21st, 2026

CVSS Vectors

V3: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Weaknesses (CWE)

CWE-502

MITRE ATT&CK TTPs

T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Application
Initial Access
T1059 Command and Scripting Interpreter
Execution
T1505.003 Web Shell
Persistence
T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer
Command and Control
T1068 Exploitation for Privilege Escalation
Privilege Escalation