CVSS: v3.1: 7.2 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H) CVSS: v4.0: 8.6 (CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:H/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/R:U/RE:M)
A UI Discrepancy for Security Feature vulnerability in the UI of Juniper Networks Junos OS on VM Host systems allows a network-based, unauthenticated attacker to access the device.On VM Host Routing Engines (RE), even if the configured public key for root has been removed, remote users which are in possession of the corresponding private key can still log in as root.
This issue affects Junos OS:
To be affected a system needs to have been configured with ssh public key authentication previously:[ system root-authentication ssh-... ]
Juniper SIRT is not aware of any malicious exploitation of this vulnerability.
This issue was seen during production usage.
The following software releases have been updated to resolve this specific issue: 22.2R3-S7, 22.4R3-S5, 23.2R2-S3, 23.4R2-S3, 24.2R1-S2, 24.2R2, 24.4R1, and all subsequent releases.
This issue is being tracked as 1819412 which is visible on the Customer Support website.
Note: Juniper SIRT's policy is not to evaluate releases which are beyond End of Engineering (EOE) or End of Life (EOL).
To prevent this issue from being ocuring, public key authentication for root can be explicitly disabled with:[ system root-authentication no-public-keys ]
2025-07-09: Initial Publication