Vulnerabilities > CVE-2020-1653 - Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in Juniper Junos

047910
CVSS 5.0 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
NONE
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
PARTIAL
network
low complexity
juniper
CWE-772

Summary

On Juniper Networks Junos OS devices, a stream of TCP packets sent to the Routing Engine (RE) may cause mbuf leak which can lead to Flexible PIC Concentrator (FPC) crash or the system to crash and restart (vmcore). This issue can be trigged by IPv4 or IPv6 and it is caused only by TCP packets. This issue is not related to any specific configuration and it affects Junos OS releases starting from 17.4R1. However, this issue does not affect Junos OS releases prior to 18.2R1 when Nonstop active routing (NSR) is configured [edit routing-options nonstop-routing]. The number of mbufs is platform dependent. The following command provides the number of mbufs counter that are currently in use and maximum number of mbufs that can be allocated on a platform: user@host> show system buffers 2437/3143/5580 mbufs in use (current/cache/total) Once the device runs out of mbufs, the FPC crashes or the vmcore occurs and the device might become inaccessible requiring a manual restart. This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS 17.4 versions prior to 17.4R2-S11, 17.4R3-S2; 18.1 versions prior to 18.1R3-S10; 18.2 versions prior to 18.2R2-S7, 18.2R3-S5; 18.2X75 versions prior to 18.2X75-D41, 18.2X75-D420.12, 18.2X75-D51, 18.2X75-D60, 18.2X75-D34; 18.3 versions prior to 18.3R2-S4, 18.3R3-S2; 18.4 versions prior to 18.4R1-S7, 18.4R2-S4, 18.4R3-S1; 19.1 versions prior to 19.1R1-S5, 19.1R2-S1, 19.1R3; 19.2 versions prior to 19.2R1-S5, 19.2R2; 19.3 versions prior to 19.3R2-S3, 19.3R3; 19.4 versions prior to 19.4R1-S2, 19.4R2. Versions of Junos OS prior to 17.4R1 are unaffected by this vulnerability.

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • HTTP DoS
    An attacker performs flooding at the HTTP level to bring down only a particular web application rather than anything listening on a TCP/IP connection. This denial of service attack requires substantially fewer packets to be sent which makes DoS harder to detect. This is an equivalent of SYN flood in HTTP. The idea is to keep the HTTP session alive indefinitely and then repeat that hundreds of times. This attack targets resource depletion weaknesses in web server software. The web server will wait to attacker's responses on the initiated HTTP sessions while the connection threads are being exhausted.