CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-0214 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability
A vulnerability in the distributed or centralized periodic packet management daemon (PPMD) of Juniper Networks Junos OS may cause receipt of a malformed packet to crash and restart the PPMD process, leading to network destabilization, service interruption, and a Denial of Service (DoS) condition. Continued receipt and processing of these malformed packets will repeatedly crash the PPMD process and sustain the Denial of Service (DoS) condition. Due to the nature of the specifically crafted packet, exploitation of this issue requires direct, adjacent connectivity to the vulnerable component. This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS: 17.3 versions prior to 17.3R3-S11; 17.4 versions prior to 17.4R2-S12, 17.4R3-S4; 18.1 versions prior to 18.1R3-S12; 18.2 versions prior to 18.2R2-S8, 18.2R3-S7; 18.3 versions prior to 18.3R3-S4; 18.4 versions prior to 18.4R1-S8, 18.4R2-S7, 18.4R3-S6; 19.1 versions prior to 19.1R1-S6, 19.1R2-S2, 19.1R3-S4; 19.2 versions prior to 19.2R1-S5, 19.2R3-S1; 19.3 versions prior to 19.3R2-S5, 19.3R3-S1; 19.4 versions prior to 19.4R2-S2, 19.4R3; 20.1 versions prior to 20.1R2; 20.2 versions prior to 20.2R1-S2, 20.2R2.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 6.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2021-04-22
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- operating-system
- Weaknesses
- CWE-20
Affected products
- juniper / junos / 17.3
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.