CVE-2023-22397 Denial of service in Junos OS Evolved

Medium 6.1 Published 12 Jan 2023 Updated 7 Apr 2025

An attacker can cause a memory leak and subsequent device reboot on Juniper PTX10003 routers by sending specific packets, leading to a denial of service.

Exploited in the wild: Not known
Login needed: Not needed
Attackable: Local or same network only
Victim action needed: Not needed
Fix: None listed

What is CVE-2023-22397?

CVE-2023-22397 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Juniper Junos Os Evolved, published on 12 Jan 2023. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

An Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling weakness in the memory management of the Packet Forwarding Engine (PFE) on Juniper Networks Junos OS Evolved PTX10003 Series devices allows an adjacently located attacker who has established certain preconditions and knowledge of the environment to send certain specific genuine packets to begin a Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition attack which will cause a memory leak to begin. Once this condition begins, and as long as the attacker is able to sustain the offending traffic, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) event occurs. As a DDoS event, the offending packets sent by the attacker will continue to flow from one device to another as long as they are received and processed by any devices, ultimately causing a cascading outage to any vulnerable devices. Devices not vulnerable to the memory leak will process and forward the offending packet(s) to neighboring devices. Due to internal anti-flood security controls and mechanisms reaching their maximum limit of response in the worst-case scenario, all affected Junos OS Evolved devices will reboot in as little as 1.5 days. Reboots to restore services cannot be avoided once the memory leak begins. The device will self-recover after crashing and rebooting. Operator intervention isn't required to restart the device. This issue affects: Juniper Networks Junos OS Evolved on PTX10003: All versions prior to 20.4R3-S4-EVO; 21.3 versions prior to 21.3R3-S1-EVO; 21.4 versions prior to 21.4R2-S2-EVO, 21.4R3-EVO; 22.1 versions prior to 22.1R1-S2-EVO, 22.1R2-EVO; 22.2 versions prior to 22.2R2-EVO. To check memory, customers may VTY to the PFE first then execute the following show statement: show jexpr jtm ingress-main-memory chip 255 | no-more Alternatively one may execute from the RE CLI: request pfe execute target fpc0 command "show jexpr jtm ingress-main-memory chip 255 | no-more" Iteration 1: Example output: Mem type: NH, alloc type: JTM 136776 bytes used (max 138216 bytes used) 911568 bytes available (909312 bytes from free pages) Iteration 2: Example output: Mem type: NH, alloc type: JTM 137288 bytes used (max 138216 bytes used) 911056 bytes available (909312 bytes from free pages) The same can be seen in the CLI below, assuming the scale does not change: show npu memory info Example output: FPC0:NPU16 mem-util-jnh-nh-size 2097152 FPC0:NPU16 mem-util-jnh-nh-allocated 135272 FPC0:NPU16 mem-util-jnh-nh-utilization 6

Weakness: CWE-770, CWE-367

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-22397?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Juniper Junos Os Evolved.

How do I fix CVE-2023-22397?

No fix has been published for CVE-2023-22397 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2023-22397 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-22397 in the wild and no public exploit code.

All Juniper Junos Os Evolved vulnerabilities

Sources

Also known as GHSA-63q5-87g5-fg36.