CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-31351 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.5

An Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions in packet processing on the MS-MPC/MS-MIC utilized by Juniper Networks Junos OS allows a malicious attacker to send a specific packet, triggering the MS-MPC/MS-MIC to reset, causing a Denial of Service (DoS). Continued receipt and processing of this packet will create a sustained Denial of Service (DoS) condition. This issue only affects specific versions of Juniper Networks Junos OS on MX Series: 17.3R3-S11; 17.4R2-S13; 17.4R3 prior to 17.4R3-S5; 18.1R3-S12; 18.2R2-S8, 18.2R3-S7, 18.2R3-S8; 18.3R3-S4; 18.4R3-S7; 19.1R3-S4, 19.1R3-S5; 19.2R1-S6; 19.3R3-S2; 19.4R2-S4, 19.4R2-S5; 19.4R3-S2; 20.1R2-S1; 20.2R2-S2, 20.2R2-S3, 20.2R3; 20.3R2, 20.3R2-S1; 20.4R1, 20.4R1-S1, 20.4R2; 21.1R1; This issue does not affect any version of Juniper Networks Junos OS prior to 15.1X49-D240;

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-10-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-754

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 17.3
  • juniper / junos / 17.4
  • juniper / junos / 18.1
  • juniper / junos / 18.2
  • juniper / junos / 18.3

Showing 5 representative product identities from 30 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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