CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-1638 — The FPC (Flexible PIC Concentrator) of Juniper Networks Junos OS and Junos OS Evolved may restart after processing a specific IPv4 packet

High CVSS 7.5

The FPC (Flexible PIC Concentrator) of Juniper Networks Junos OS and Junos OS Evolved may restart after processing a specific IPv4 packet. Only packets destined to the device itself, successfully reaching the RE through existing edge and control plane filtering, will be able to cause the FPC restart. When this issue occurs, all traffic via the FPC will be dropped. By continuously sending this specific IPv4 packet, an attacker can repeatedly crash the FPC, causing an extended Denial of Service (DoS) condition. This issue can only occur when processing a specific IPv4 packet. IPv6 packets cannot trigger this issue. This issue affects: Juniper Networks Junos OS on MX Series with MPC10E or MPC11E and PTX10001: 19.2 versions prior to 19.2R1-S4, 19.2R2; 19.3 versions prior to 19.3R2-S2, 19.3R3; 19.4 versions prior to 19.4R1-S1, 19.4R2. Juniper Networks Junos OS Evolved on on QFX5220, and PTX10003 series: 19.2-EVO versions; 19.3-EVO versions; 19.4-EVO versions prior to 19.4R2-EVO. This issue does not affect Junos OS versions prior to 19.2R1. This issue does not affect Junos OS Evolved versions prior to 19.2R1-EVO.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2020-04-08
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-467

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 19.2
  • juniper / junos / 19.3
  • juniper / junos / 19.4
  • juniper / junos_os_evolved / 19.2
  • juniper / junos_os_evolved / 19.3

Showing 5 representative product identities from 13 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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