CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-28974 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.4

An Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions vulnerability in the bbe-smgd of Juniper Networks Junos OS allows an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause a Denial of Service (DoS). In a Broadband Edge / Subscriber Management scenario on MX Series when a specifically malformed ICMP packet addressed to the device is received from a subscriber the bbe-smgd will crash, affecting the subscriber sessions that are connecting, updating, or terminating. Continued receipt of such packets will lead to a sustained DoS condition. When this issue happens the below log can be seen if the traceoptions for the processes smg-service are enabled: BBE_TRACE(TRACE_LEVEL_INFO, "%s: Dropped unsupported ICMP PKT ... This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS on MX Series: All versions prior to 19.4R3-S11; 20.2 versions prior to 20.2R3-S7; 20.3 versions prior to 20.3R3-S6; 20.4 versions prior to 20.4R3-S6; 21.1 versions prior to 21.1R3-S4; 21.2 versions prior to 21.2R3-S4; 21.3 versions prior to 21.3R3-S3; 21.4 versions prior to 21.4R3-S2; 22.1 versions prior to 22.1R2-S2, 22.1R3; 22.2 versions prior to 22.2R2; 22.3 versions prior to 22.3R1-S2, 22.3R2.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.4 (3.1)
Published
2023-04-17
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-754

Affected products

  • juniper / junos
  • juniper / junos / 19.4

Showing 2 representative product identities from 104 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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