CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-0243 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability
Improper Handling of Unexpected Data in the firewall policer of Juniper Networks Junos OS on EX4300 switches allows matching traffic to exceed set policer limits, possibly leading to a limited Denial of Service (DoS) condition. When the firewall policer discard action fails on a Layer 2 port, it will allow traffic to pass even though it exceeds set policer limits. Traffic will not get discarded, and will be forwarded even though a policer discard action is configured. When the issue occurs, traffic is not discarded as desired, which can be observed by comparing the Input bytes with the Output bytes using the following command: user@junos> monitor interface traffic Interface Link Input bytes (bps) Output bytes (bps) ge-0/0/0 Up 37425422 (82616) 37425354 (82616) <<<< egress ge-0/0/1 Up 37425898 (82616) 37425354 (82616) <<<< ingress The expected output, with input and output counters differing, is shown below: Interface Link Input bytes (bps) Output bytes (bps) ge-0/0/0 Up 342420570 (54600) 342422760 (54600) <<<< egress ge-0/0/1 Up 517672120 (84000) 342420570 (54600) <<<< ingress This issue only affects IPv4 policing. IPv6 traffic and firewall policing actions are not affected by thi…
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 4.7 (3.1)
- Published
- 2021-04-22
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- operating-system
- Weaknesses
- CWE-241
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
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