# CVE-2023-22397: Denial of service in Junos OS Evolved > 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. - **Severity:** Medium 6.1 (`CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H`) - **Exploited in the wild:** Not known - **Login needed:** Not needed - **Attackable:** Local or same network only - **Victim action needed:** Not needed - **Fix available:** No - **Published:** 12 Jan 2023 - **Updated:** 7 Apr 2025 - **Also known as:** GHSA-63q5-87g5-fg36 ## 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 (Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling), CWE-367 (Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition) ## Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-22397? It affects 1 product. Products: 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. ## Is CVE-2023-22397 being exploited? There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-22397 in the wild and no public exploit code. ## Other vulnerabilities in Juniper Junos Os Evolved - [CVE-2026-21902](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-21902/): Junos OS Evolved: PTX Series: A vulnerability allows a unauthenticated, network-based attacker to execute code as root (critical 9.3) - [CVE-2023-28983](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2023-28983/): Junos OS Evolved: Shell Injection vulnerability in the gNOI server (high 8.8) - [CVE-2025-21599](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-21599/): Denial of service in Junos OS Evolved (high 8.7) - [CVE-2024-47502](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-47502/): Junos OS Evolved: TCP session state is not always cleared on the Routing Engine leading to DoS (high 8.7) - [CVE-2024-39531](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-39531/): Junos OS Evolved: ACX 7000 Series: Protocol specific DDoS configuration affects other protocols (high 8.7) ## Fix prompt for AI coding agents ```text Check this codebase for CVE-2023-22397 and fix it if it is affected. What it is: 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. Exploitation: There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-22397 in the wild and no public exploit code. Affected product: Juniper Junos Os Evolved. No package-level version data is available, so check the vendor advisory linked from the reference page. Task: 1. Search the dependency manifests and lockfiles (for example package.json, package-lock.json, requirements.txt, poetry.lock, uv.lock, pom.xml, build.gradle, go.mod, Cargo.lock, Gemfile.lock) and any Dockerfiles for the affected packages, including transitive dependencies. 2. If an affected version is in use, upgrade it to the fixed version for its release line with the project's package manager, so the lockfile is regenerated. Prefer the smallest upgrade that fixes it. 3. If there is no fix, or the upgrade would break the build, do not guess: explain the risk and the safest workaround instead. 4. Run the tests and summarise what changed and why. 5. If nothing in the project is affected, say so and change nothing. Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2023-22397/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2023-22397/index.md) ``` ## Sources - CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-22397 - NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-22397 - OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2023-22397 --- From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2023-22397/ Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.