Junos OS: MX Series with SPC3, and SRX Series: If specific IPsec parameters are negotiated iked will crash due to a memory leak

A Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in the IKE daemon (iked) of Juniper Networks Junos OS on MX Series with SPC3, and SRX Series allows an administratively adjacent attacker which is able to successfully establish IPsec tunnels to cause a Denial of Service (DoS).

If specific values for the IPsec parameters local-ip, remote-ip, remote ike-id, and traffic selectors are sent from the peer, a memory leak occurs during every IPsec SA rekey which is carried out with a specific message sequence. This will eventually result in an iked process crash and restart.

The iked process memory consumption can be checked using the below command:

user@host> show system processes extensive | grep iked

PID USERNAME   PRI NICE   SIZE   RES   STATE   C TIME WCPU COMMAND

56903 root       31   0     4016M 2543M CPU0   0 2:10 10.50% iked

This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS:

* All versions earlier than 20.4R3-S9;

* 21.2 versions earlier than 21.2R3-S7;

* 21.3 versions earlier than 21.3R3-S5;

* 21.4 versions earlier than 21.4R3-S4;

* 22.1 versions earlier than 22.1R3-S3;

* 22.2 versions earlier than 22.2R3-S2;

* 22.3 versions earlier than 22.3R3;

* 22.4 versions earlier than 22.4R3;

* 23.2 versions earlier than 23.2R1-S2, 23.2R2.