Technical impact
A missing release of memory after effective lifetime vulnerability in the routing protocol daemon (rpd) allows an unauthenticated attacker controlling a neighboring IS‑IS node to send a specially crafted update packet, causing a memory leak. Continued receipt of such packets exhausts all available memory, causing the rpd process to crash and resulting in a denial‑of‑service condition for the router.
Affected Systems
Juniper Networks Junos OS and Junos OS Evolved devices are affected. For Junos OS the issue impacts all releases from 23.2 up to but not including 23.2R2, from 23.4 up to but not including the first release after 23.4R1‑S2, and from 24.1 up to but not including 24.1R2. For Junos OS Evolved the affected range mirrors the Junos OS range, with the same release boundaries. Devices running versions earlier than 23.2R1 or 23.2R1‑EVO are not affected.
Risk and Exploitability
The severity is rated at CVSS 7.1 (medium) and the EPSS score is below 1%, indicating a low probability of exploitation in the wild. Nonetheless, the vulnerability is unauthenticated and requires only that an attacker control a neighboring IS‑IS node, which is relatively trivial to achieve in many environments. Because the exploit simply involves sending repeated update packets that trigger a memory leak, operators should treat this as a moderate risk until the software is patched. The vulnerability is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog as of the current data.
