CVE-2024-21599

A Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in the Packet Forwarding Engine (PFE) of Juniper Networks Junos OS on MX Series allows an adjacent, unauthenticated attacker to cause a Denial of Service (DoS).

If an MX Series device receives PTP packets on an MPC3E that doesnt support PTP this causes a memory leak which will result in unpredictable behavior and ultimately in an MPC crash and restart.

To monitor for this issue, please use the following FPC vty level commands:

show heap shows an increase in LAN buffer utilization and

show clksync ptp nbr-upd-info shows non-zero Pending PFEs counter.

This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS on MX Series with MPC3E:

• All versions earlier than 20.4R3-S3;
• 21.1 versions earlier than 21.1R3-S4;
• 21.2 versions earlier than 21.2R3;
• 21.3 versions earlier than 21.3R2-S1, 21.3R3;
• 21.4 versions earlier than 21.4R2;
• 22.1 versions earlier than 22.1R2.

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://supportportal.juniper.net/JSA75740
• https://www.first.org/cvss/calculator/4.0#CVSS:4.0/AV:A/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:L