CVE-2023-36841: Juniper Junos

High severity, CVSS 7.5. EPSS: 0.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

An Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions vulnerability in the Packet Forwarding Engine (pfe) of Juniper Networks Junos OS on MX Series allows a unauthenticated network-based attacker to cause an infinite loop, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS). An attacker who sends malformed TCP traffic via an interface configured with PPPoE, causes an infinite loop on the respective PFE. This results in consuming all resources and a manual restart is needed to recover. This issue affects interfaces with PPPoE configured and tcp-mss enabled. This issue affects Juniper Networks Junos OS * All versions prior to 20.4R3-S7; * 21.1 version 21.1R1 and later versions; * 21.2 versions prior to 21.2R3-S6; * 21.3 versions prior to 21.3R3-S5; * 21.4 versions prior to 21.4R3-S3; * 22.1 versions prior to 22.1R3-S4; * 22.2 versions prior to 22.2R3; * 22.3 versions prior to 22.3R2-S2; * 22.4 versions prior to 22.4R2;

Affected products

• Juniper Junos: before 20.4 (fixed in 20.4); version 20.4 only; version 21.1 only; version 21.2 only; version 21.3 only; version 21.4 only; …

Published 2023-10-12. Last modified 2026-06-17.