CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-21909 — Juniper Junos security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.1

A Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in the routing protocol daemon (rpd) Juniper Networks Junos OS and Junos OS Evolved allows an unauthenticated attacker controlling an adjacent IS-IS neighbor to send a specific update packet causing a memory leak. Continued receipt and processing of these packets will exhaust all available memory, crashing rpd and creating a Denial of Service (DoS) condition. Memory usage can be monitored through the use of the 'show task memory detail' command. For example: user@junos> show task memory detail | match ted-infra TED-INFRA-COOKIE 25 1072 28 1184 229 user@junos> show task memory detail | match ted-infra TED-INFRA-COOKIE 31 1360 34 1472 307 This issue affects: Junos OS: * from 23.2 before 23.2R2, * from 23.4 before 23.4R1-S2, 23.4R2, * from 24.1 before 24.1R2; Junos OS Evolved: * from 23.2 before 23.2R2-EVO, * from 23.4 before 23.4R1-S2-EVO, 23.4R2-EVO, * from 24.1 before 24.1R2-EVO. This issue does not affect Junos OS versions before 23.2R1 or Junos OS Evolved versions before 23.2R1-EVO.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.1 (4.0)
Published
2026-01-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-401

Affected products

  • juniper / junos / 23.2
  • juniper / junos / 23.4
  • juniper / junos / 24.1
  • juniper / junos_os_evolved / 23.2

Showing 4 representative product identities from 20 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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