CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-31368 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

An Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in the kernel of Juniper Networks JUNOS OS allows an unauthenticated network based attacker to cause 100% CPU load and the device to become unresponsive by sending a flood of traffic to the out-of-band management ethernet port. Continued receipted of a flood will create a sustained Denial of Service (DoS) condition. Once the flood subsides the system will recover by itself. An indication that the system is affected by this issue would be that kernel and netisr process are shown to be using a lot of CPU cycles like in the following example output: user@host> show system processes extensive ... PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 16 root -72 - 0K 304K WAIT 1 839:40 88.96% intr{swi1: netisr 0} 0 root 97 - 0K 160K RUN 1 732:43 87.99% kernel{bcm560xgmac0 que} This issue affects Juniper Networks JUNOS OS on EX2300 Series, EX3400 Series, and ACX710: All 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 18.4R2-S8, 18.4R3-S9; 19.1 versions prior to 19.1R3-S5; 19.2 versions prior to 19.2R1-S7, 19.2R3-S3; 19.3 versions prior to 19.3R2-S6, 19.3R3-S2; 1…

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (2.0)
Published
2021-10-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • juniper / junos
  • juniper / junos / 18.1

Showing 2 representative product identities from 165 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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