CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-0255 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

A local privilege escalation vulnerability in ethtraceroute of Juniper Networks Junos OS may allow a locally authenticated user with shell access to escalate privileges and write to the local filesystem as root. ethtraceroute is shipped with setuid permissions enabled and is owned by the root user, allowing local users to run ethtraceroute with root privileges. This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS: 15.1X49 versions prior to 15.1X49-D240; 17.3 versions prior to 17.3R3-S11, 17.4 versions prior to 17.4R3-S4; 18.1 versions prior to 18.1R3-S12; 18.2 versions prior to 18.2R3-S7; 18.3 versions prior to 18.3R3-S4; 18.4 versions prior to 18.4R2-S7; 19.1 versions prior to 19.1R1-S6, 19.1R2-S2, 19.1R3-S4; 19.3 versions prior to 19.3R3-S2; 19.4 versions prior to 19.4R3-S1; 20.1 versions prior to 20.1R2, 20.1R3; 20.2 versions prior to 20.2R2-S1, 20.2R3; 20.3 versions prior to 20.3R1-S1.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (3.1)
Published
2021-04-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-250, CWE-269

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 17.3

Showing 1 representative product identities from 183 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Privilege escalation and unsafe privilege management

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map service accounts, operating-system identities, roles, capabilities, impersonation, set-user transitions, and administrative helper paths.
  • Determine whether untrusted users or lower-privilege processes can reach the affected transition or modify inputs it trusts.
  • Review file, socket, registry, device, job, container, and cloud-role permissions used before and after privilege changes.

Remediate safely

  • Apply the supported fix and redesign privileged operations as a minimal, authenticated, allowlisted interface.
  • Drop privileges before processing untrusted input, verify the drop succeeds, and remove unnecessary roles, capabilities, and write permissions.
  • Validate ownership and permissions at time of use and add explicit lower-to-higher privilege boundary tests.

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.