CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-0229 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.3

An uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) server of Juniper Networks Junos OS allows an attacker to cause MQTT server to crash and restart leading to a Denial of Service (DoS) by sending a stream of specific packets. A Juniper Extension Toolkit (JET) application designed with a listening port uses the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol to connect to a mosquitto broker that is running on Junos OS to subscribe for events. Continued receipt and processing of this packet will create a sustained Denial of Service (DoS) condition. This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS: 16.1R1 and later versions prior to 17.3R3-S11; 17.4 versions prior to 17.4R2-S13, 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-S7; 19.1 versions prior to 19.1R3-S5; 19.2 versions prior to 19.2R1-S6, 19.2R3-S2; 19.3 versions prior to 19.3R3-S2; 19.4 versions prior to 19.4R2-S4, 19.4R3-S2; 20.1 versions prior to 20.1R2-S1, 20.1R3; 20.2 versions prior to 20.2R2-S2, 20.2R3; 20.3 versions prior to 20.3R1-S1, 20.3R2. This is…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2021-04-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 16.1

Showing 1 representative product identities from 260 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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