CVE-2023-22406

A Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in the kernel of Juniper Networks Junos OS and Junos OS Evolved allows an adjacent, unauthenticated attacker to cause a Denial of Service (DoS). In a segment-routing scenario with OSPF as IGP, when a peer interface continuously flaps, next-hop churn will happen and a continuous increase in Routing Protocol Daemon (rpd) memory consumption will be observed. This will eventually lead to an rpd crash and restart when the memory is full. The memory consumption can be monitored using the CLI command show task memory detail as shown in the following example: user@host> show task memory detail | match RT_NEXTHOPS_TEMPLATE|RT_TEMPLATE_BOOK_KEE RT_NEXTHOPS_TEMPLATE 1008 1024 T 50 51200 50 51200 RT_NEXTHOPS_TEMPLATE 688 768 T 50 38400 50 38400 RT_NEXTHOPS_TEMPLATE 368 384 T 412330 158334720 412330 158334720 RT_TEMPLATE_BOOK_KEE 2064 2560 T 33315 85286400 33315 85286400 user@host> show task memory detail | match RT_NEXTHOPS_TEMPLATE|RT_TEMPLATE_BOOK_KEE RT_NEXTHOPS_TEMPLATE 1008 1024 T 50 51200 50 51200 RT_NEXTHOPS_TEMPLATE 688 768 T 50 38400 50 38400 RT_NEXTHOPS_TEMPLATE 368 384 T 419005 160897920 419005 160897920 <=== RT_TEMPLATE_BOOK_KEE 2064 2560 T 39975 102336000 39975 10233600 <=== This issue affects: Juniper Networks Junos OS All versions prior to 19.3R3-S7; 19.4 versions prior to 19.4R2-S8, 19.4R3-S9; 20.2 versions prior to 20.2R3-S5; 20.3 versions prior to 20.3R3-S5; 20.4 versions prior to 20.4R3-S4; 21.1 versions prior to 21.1R3-S3; 21.2 versions prior to 21.2R3-S2; 21.3 versions prior to 21.3R3-S1; 21.4 versions prior to 21.4R2-S1, 21.4R3; 22.1 versions prior to 22.1R2. Juniper Networks Junos OS Evolved All versions prior to 20.4R3-S4-EVO; 21.4 versions prior to 21.4R2-S1-EVO, 21.4R3-EVO; 22.1 versions prior to 22.1R2-EVO.

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
• For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
• When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
• To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References

• https://kb.juniper.net/JSA70202