CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2024-21604 — Juniper Junos Os Evolved security vulnerability
An Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in the kernel of Juniper Networks Junos OS Evolved allows an unauthenticated, network-based attacker to cause a Denial of Service (DoS). If a high rate of specific valid packets are processed by the routing engine (RE) this will lead to a loss of connectivity of the RE with other components of the chassis and thereby a complete and persistent system outage. Please note that a carefully designed lo0 firewall filter will block or limit these packets which should prevent this issue from occurring. The following log messages can be seen when this issue occurs: <host> kernel: nf_conntrack: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS Evolved: * All versions earlier than 20.4R3-S7-EVO; * 21.2R1-EVO and later versions; * 21.4-EVO versions earlier than 21.4R3-S5-EVO; * 22.1-EVO versions earlier than 22.1R3-S2-EVO; * 22.2-EVO versions earlier than 22.2R3-EVO; * 22.3-EVO versions earlier than 22.3R2-EVO; * 22.4-EVO versions earlier than 22.4R2-EVO.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2024-01-12
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- operating-system
- Weaknesses
- CWE-770
Affected products
- juniper / junos_os_evolved / 21.2
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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