CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-31361 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability
An Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions vulnerability combined with Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions in Juniper Networks Junos OS on QFX Series and PTX Series allows an unauthenticated network based attacker to cause increased FPC CPU utilization by sending specific IP packets which are being VXLAN encapsulated leading to a partial Denial of Service (DoS). Continued receipted of these specific traffic will create a sustained Denial of Service (DoS) condition. This issue affects: Juniper Networks Junos OS on QFX Series: All versions prior to 17.3R3-S11; 17.4 versions prior to 17.4R2-S13, 17.4R3-S4; 18.1 versions prior to 18.1R3-S12; 18.2 versions prior to 18.2R2-S8, 18.2R3-S7; 18.3 versions prior to 18.3R3-S4; 18.4 versions prior to 18.4R1-S8, 18.4R2-S7, 18.4R3-S7; 19.1 versions prior to 19.1R1-S6, 19.1R2-S2, 19.1R3-S4; 19.2 versions prior to 19.2R1-S6, 19.2R3-S2; 19.3 versions prior to 19.3R3-S1; 19.4 versions prior to 19.4R2-S3, 19.4R3-S1; 20.1 versions prior to 20.1R2, 20.1R3; 20.2 versions prior to 20.2R2, 20.2R3; 20.3 versions prior to 20.3R1-S1, 20.3R2. Juniper Networks Junos OS on PTX Series: All versions prior to 18.4R3-S9; 19.1 versions prior to…
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 5.3 (3.1)
- Published
- 2021-10-19
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- operating-system
- Weaknesses
- CWE-754, CWE-755
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
The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.