Junos OS: SRX Series: Flow sessions are not getting cleared leading to a DoS

Summary

A Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization ('Race Condition') vulnerability in the packet forwarding engine (PFE) of Juniper Networks Junos OS on SRX Series allows an unauthenticated, network-based attacker to cause a Denial-of-Service (DoS).

As part of the stateful traffic processing on SRX Series devices flows are being established, and removed when not needed anymore. During the removal process the timeout of a flow should be set to 3 seconds and consequentially the flow should be removed shortly after. Due to a race condition occurring when setting the timeout there is a chance (the exact conditions are outside the attackers control) that the timeout is instead set to a very high value of larger than 10,000 seconds:

user@host> show security flow session | match timeout Session ID: 98784248524, Policy name: PROD-FLOW/4, HA State: Active, Timeout: 85250, Session State: Valid

This will lead to an accumulation of flows which can be observed by an ever-increasing value of invalidated sessions in the output of 'show security flow session summary':

user@host> show security flow session summary | match invalid Invalidated sessions: 216931These sessions can't be cleared manually with the 'clear security flow session' command, which will either lead to forwarding to stop (and the system needs to be manually recovered with a reboot) or to a flowd core and automatic reboot.

This issue affects Junos OS on SRX Series:

* 24.2 versions before 24.2R2-S3, * 24.4 versions before 24.4R2-S1, 24.4R2-S2, * 25.2 versions before 25.2R1-S2, 25.2R2.

This issue does not affect releases earlier than 24.2R1;