CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-0257 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

On Juniper Networks MX Series and EX9200 Series platforms with Trio-based MPCs (Modular Port Concentrators) where Integrated Routing and Bridging (IRB) interfaces are configured and mapped to a VPLS instance or a Bridge-Domain, certain Layer 2 network events at Customer Edge (CE) devices may cause memory leaks in the MPC of Provider Edge (PE) devices which can cause an out of memory condition and MPC restart. When this issue occurs, there will be temporary traffic interruption until the MPC is restored. An administrator can use the following CLI command to monitor the status of memory usage level of the MPC: user@device> show system resource-monitor fpc FPC Resource Usage Summary Free Heap Mem Watermark : 20 % Free NH Mem Watermark : 20 % Free Filter Mem Watermark : 20 % * - Watermark reached Slot # % Heap Free RTT Average RTT 1 87 PFE # % ENCAP mem Free % NH mem Free % FW mem Free 0 NA 88 99 1 NA 89 99 When the issue is occurring, the value of “% NH mem Free” will go down until the MPC restarts. This issue affects MX Series and EX9200 Series with Trio-based PFEs (Packet Forwarding Engines), including MX-MPC1-3D, MX-MPC1E-3D, MX-MPC2-3D, MX-MPC2E-3D, MPC-3D-16XGE, and CHAS-MXxx Se…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-04-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-401

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 17.3

Showing 1 representative product identities from 132 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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