CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-21603 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.5

An Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions vulnerability in the kernel of Juniper Network Junos OS on MX Series allows a network based attacker with low privileges to cause a denial of service. If a scaled configuration for Source class usage (SCU) / destination class usage (DCU) (more than 10 route classes) is present and the SCU/DCU statistics are gathered by executing specific SNMP requests or CLI commands, a 'vmcore' for the RE kernel will be seen which leads to a device restart. Continued exploitation of this issue will lead to a sustained DoS. This issue only affects MX Series devices with MPC10, MPC11 or LC9600, and MX304. No other MX Series devices are affected. This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS: * All versions earlier than 20.4R3-S9; * 21.2 versions earlier than 21.2R3-S6; * 21.3 versions earlier than 21.3R3-S5; * 21.4 versions earlier than 21.4R3; * 22.1 versions earlier than 22.1R3; * 22.2 versions earlier than 22.2R2; * 22.3 versions earlier than 22.3R2.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2024-01-12
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-754

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 20.4

Showing 1 representative product identities from 62 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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