CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-1683 — On Juniper Networks Junos OS devices, a specific SNMP OID poll causes a memory leak which over time leads to a kernel crash (vmcore)

High CVSS 7.8

On Juniper Networks Junos OS devices, a specific SNMP OID poll causes a memory leak which over time leads to a kernel crash (vmcore). Prior to the kernel crash other processes might be impacted, such as failure to establish SSH connection to the device. The administrator can monitor the output of the following command to check if there is memory leak caused by this issue: user@device> show system virtual-memory | match "pfe_ipc|kmem" pfe_ipc 147 5K - 164352 16,32,64,8192 <-- increasing vm.kmem_map_free: 127246336 <-- decreasing pfe_ipc 0 0K - 18598 32,8192 vm.kmem_map_free: 134582272 This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS: 17.4R3; 18.1 version 18.1R3-S5 and later versions prior to 18.1R3-S10; 18.2 version 18.2R3 and later versions prior to 18.2R3-S3; 18.2X75 version 18.2X75-D420, 18.2X75-D50 and later versions prior to 18.2X75-D430, 18.2X75-D53, 18.2X75-D60; 18.3 version 18.3R3 and later versions prior to 18.3R3-S2; 18.4 version 18.4R1-S4, 18.4R2 and later versions prior to 18.4R2-S5, 18.4R3-S1; 19.1 version 19.1R2 and later versions prior to 19.1R2-S2, 19.1R3; 19.2 version 19.2R1 and later versions prior to 19.2R1-S5, 19.2R2; 19.3 versions prior to 19.3R2-S5, 19.3R3; 19.4 v…

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2020-10-16
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 17.4
  • juniper / junos / 18.1
  • juniper / junos / 18.2
  • juniper / junos / 18.2x75

Showing 4 representative product identities from 43 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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