CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-31366 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

An Unchecked Return Value vulnerability in the authd (authentication daemon) of Juniper Networks Junos OS on MX Series configured for subscriber management / BBE allows an adjacent attacker to cause a crash by sending a specific username. This impacts authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) services on the MX devices and leads to a Denial of Service (DoS) condition. Continued receipted of these PPP login request will create a sustained Denial of Service (DoS) condition. This issue affects: Juniper Networks Junos OS 15.1 versions prior to 15.1R7-S9; 17.3 versions prior to 17.3R3-S12; 17.4 versions prior to 17.4R3-S5; 18.1 versions prior to 18.1R3-S13; 18.2 versions prior to 18.2R3-S8; 18.3 versions prior to 18.3R3-S5; 18.4 versions prior to 18.4R3-S9; 19.1 versions prior to 19.1R3-S6; 19.2 versions prior to 19.2R1-S7, 19.2R3-S3; 19.3 versions prior to 19.3R2-S6, 19.3R3-S3; 19.4 versions prior to 19.4R3-S3; 20.1 versions prior to 20.1R3; 20.2 versions prior to 20.2R3-S1; 20.3 versions prior to 20.3R3; 20.4 versions prior to 20.4R3; 21.1 versions prior to 21.1R2.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-10-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-252

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 15.1

Showing 1 representative product identities from 267 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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