CVE-2024-35199 — HIGH (CVSS 8.2) AI Security Vulnerability

CISO Take

TorchServe exposes its gRPC inference (7070) and management (7071) ports on all network interfaces by default, granting unauthenticated remote access to any deployed PyTorch model. Any attacker with network visibility—including inside your perimeter—can query models, extract behavior, or cause denial of service with zero credentials. Upgrade to v0.11.0 immediately or block ports 7070-7071 at the firewall until you can patch.

Risk Assessment

High practical risk for self-hosted TorchServe deployments. CVSS 8.2 with network vector, low complexity, and no authentication required makes this trivially exploitable by anyone who can reach the host. Shared cloud environments, multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters, and on-prem data science platforms are highest risk. Exposure is compounded because ML engineers rarely consider inference servers as attack surfaces. AWS SageMaker and EKS users are explicitly not affected per the advisory.

Affected Systems

Package	Ecosystem	Vulnerable Range	Patched
torchserve	pip	—	No patch
99.6K OpenSSF 6.4 21.7K dependents Pushed 6d ago 8% patched ~142d to patch Full package profile →

Do you use torchserve? You're affected.

Severity & Risk

CVSS 3.1

8.2 / 10

EPSS

0.1%

chance of exploitation in 30 days

Higher than 21% of all CVEs

Source: EPSS v3 — FIRST.org

Exploitation Status

Exploit Available

Exploitation: MEDIUM

Sophistication

Trivial

Exploitation Confidence

medium

○ Public PoC indexed (trickest/cve)

Composite signal derived from CISA KEV, CISA SSVC, EPSS, trickest/cve, and Nuclei templates.

Attack Surface

AV Network

AC Low

PR None

UI None

S Unchanged

C Low

I None

A High

Recommended Action

6 steps

Upgrade to TorchServe v0.11.0 which binds gRPC ports to localhost by default.
Immediate workaround if upgrade is blocked: add host-based firewall rules blocking inbound access to ports 7070 and 7071 from untrusted networks.
Audit all TorchServe instances for network exposure: scan internal network for open 7070/7071.
Enable TorchServe authentication tokens for the REST management API as defense-in-depth.
Segment model serving infrastructure in dedicated VLANs or security groups with least-privilege access.
Detect exploitation by monitoring inference logs for anomalous request volumes or unknown client IPs.

CISA SSVC Assessment

Decision Track

Exploitation none

Automatable Yes

Technical Impact partial

Source: CISA Vulnrichment (SSVC v2.0). Decision based on the CISA Coordinator decision tree.

Classification

DoS Data Extraction Auth Bypass Inference Framework AML.T0006 - Active Scanning AML.T0024.002 - Extract AI Model AML.T0029 - Denial of AI Service AML.T0040 - AI Model Inference API Access AML.T0049 - Exploit Public-Facing Application

Compliance Impact

This CVE is relevant to:

EU AI Act

Article 15 - Accuracy, robustness and cybersecurity

ISO 42001

Clause 8.4 - AI system operation and monitoring

NIST AI RMF

MANAGE-2.2 - Mechanisms to sustain treatment of AI risks

OWASP LLM Top 10

LLM04 - Model Denial of Service

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CVE-2024-35199?

TorchServe exposes its gRPC inference (7070) and management (7071) ports on all network interfaces by default, granting unauthenticated remote access to any deployed PyTorch model. Any attacker with network visibility—including inside your perimeter—can query models, extract behavior, or cause denial of service with zero credentials. Upgrade to v0.11.0 immediately or block ports 7070-7071 at the firewall until you can patch.

Is CVE-2024-35199 actively exploited?

Proof-of-concept exploit code is publicly available for CVE-2024-35199, increasing the risk of exploitation.

How to fix CVE-2024-35199?

1. Upgrade to TorchServe v0.11.0 which binds gRPC ports to localhost by default. 2. Immediate workaround if upgrade is blocked: add host-based firewall rules blocking inbound access to ports 7070 and 7071 from untrusted networks. 3. Audit all TorchServe instances for network exposure: scan internal network for open 7070/7071. 4. Enable TorchServe authentication tokens for the REST management API as defense-in-depth. 5. Segment model serving infrastructure in dedicated VLANs or security groups with least-privilege access. 6. Detect exploitation by monitoring inference logs for anomalous request volumes or unknown client IPs.

What systems are affected by CVE-2024-35199?

This vulnerability affects the following AI/ML architecture patterns: model serving, inference infrastructure, ML production deployment, on-premises AI platforms, multi-tenant ML clusters.

What is the CVSS score for CVE-2024-35199?

CVE-2024-35199 has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 8.2 (HIGH). The EPSS exploitation probability is 0.07%.

Technical Details

NVD Description

TorchServe is a flexible and easy-to-use tool for serving and scaling PyTorch models in production. In affected versions the two gRPC ports 7070 and 7071, are not bound to [localhost](http://localhost/) by default, so when TorchServe is launched, these two interfaces are bound to all interfaces. Customers using PyTorch inference Deep Learning Containers (DLC) through Amazon SageMaker and EKS are not affected. This issue in TorchServe has been fixed in PR #3083. TorchServe release 0.11.0 includes the fix to address this vulnerability. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Exploitation Scenario

An attacker performing lateral movement inside a corporate network runs a port scan and discovers host 10.1.5.12 with ports 7070/7071 open. Using the TorchServe Python client or raw gRPC tooling (no credentials required), they enumerate all registered models via the management API, identify a proprietary fraud-detection model, and submit thousands of crafted inference requests to build a functional replica via model extraction. In parallel, they flood the inference port with oversized payloads to degrade availability for legitimate ML workloads—all without ever needing a username or password.