CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-1661 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.3

On Juniper Networks Junos OS devices configured as a DHCP forwarder, the Juniper Networks Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Daemon (jdhcp) process might crash when receiving a malformed DHCP packet. This issue only affects devices configured as DHCP forwarder with forward-only option, that forward specified DHCP client packets, without creating a new subscriber session. The jdhcpd daemon automatically restarts without intervention, but continuous receipt of the malformed DHCP packet will repeatedly crash jdhcpd, leading to an extended Denial of Service (DoS) condition. This issue can be triggered only by DHCPv4, it cannot be triggered by DHCPv6. This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS: 12.3 versions prior to 12.3R12-S16; 12.3X48 versions prior to 12.3X48-D105 on SRX Series; 14.1X53 versions prior to 14.1X53-D60 on EX and QFX Series; 15.1 versions prior to 15.1R7-S7; 15.1X49 versions prior to 15.1X49-D221, 15.1X49-D230 on SRX Series; 15.1X53 versions prior to 15.1X53-D593 on EX2300/EX3400; 16.1 versions prior to 16.1R7-S5.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2020-10-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 12.3

Showing 1 representative product identities from 204 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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.