CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2024-39562 — Juniper Junos Os Evolved security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.7

A Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime vulnerability the xinetd process, responsible for spawning SSH daemon (sshd) instances, of Juniper Networks Junos OS Evolved allows an unauthenticated network-based attacker to cause a Denial of Service (DoS) by blocking SSH access for legitimate users. Continued receipt of these connections will create a sustained Denial of Service (DoS) condition. The issue is triggered when a high rate of concurrent SSH requests are received and terminated in a specific way, causing xinetd to crash, and leaving defunct sshd processes. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability blocks both SSH access as well as services which rely upon SSH, such as SFTP, and Netconf over SSH. Once the system is in this state, legitimate users will be unable to SSH to the device until service is manually restored. See WORKAROUND section below. Administrators can monitor an increase in defunct sshd processes by utilizing the CLI command: > show system processes | match sshd root 25219 30901 0 Jul16 ? 00:00:00 [sshd] <defunct> This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS Evolved: * All versions prior to 21.4R3-S7-EVO * 22.3-EVO versions prior to 22.3R2-S2-EV…

Severity
High
CVSS
8.7 (4.0)
Published
2024-07-10
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-772

Affected products

  • juniper / junos_os_evolved
  • juniper / junos_os_evolved / 21.4

Showing 2 representative product identities from 32 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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