CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-0290 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions in Ethernet interface frame processing of Juniper Networks Junos OS allows an attacker to send specially crafted frames over the local Ethernet segment, causing the interface to go into a down state, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) condition. The interface does not recover on its own and the FPC must be reset manually. Continued receipt and processing of these frames will create a sustained Denial of Service (DoS) condition. This issue is platform-specific and affects the following platforms and line cards: * MPC7E/8E/9E and MPC10E on MX240, MX480, MX960, MX2008, MX2010, and MX2020 * MX204, MX10003, MX10008, MX10016 * EX9200, EX9251 * SRX4600 No other products or platforms are affected by this vulnerability. An indication of this issue occurring can be seen in the system log messages, as shown below: user@host> show log messages | match "Failed to complete DFE tuning" fpc4 smic_phy_dfe_tuning_state: et-4/1/6 - Failed to complete DFE tuning (count 3) and interface will be in a permanently down state: user@host> show interfaces et-4/1/6 terse Interface Admin Link Proto Local Remote et-4/1/6 up down et-4/1/6.0 up down aenet --> ae101…

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-07-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-755

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 16.1

Showing 1 representative product identities from 162 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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