An authentication bypass vulnerability in the initial boot sequence of Juniper Networks Junos OS on vSRX Series may allow an attacker to gain full control of the system without authentication when the system is initially booted up.

Affected releases are Juniper Networks Junos OS:

• 15.1X49 versions prior to 15.1X49-D30 on vSRX.

Juniper SIRT is not aware of any malicious exploitation of this vulnerability.

This issue was found during internal product security testing or research.

This issue has been assigned CVE-2018-0053 .
 

The following software releases have been updated to resolve this specific issue: Junos OS 15.1X49-D30, and all subsequent releases.

This issue is being tracked as PR 1078011 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).
 

Software Releases, patches and updates are available at https://www.juniper.net/support/downloads/ .
 

There are no viable workarounds for this issue.

Methods which may reduce, but not eliminate, the risk of exploitation of this problem, and which does not resolve the underlying problem include:

• Restrict access to the hypervisor to only trusted administrators.
• Disallow all access to the "physical instance" of the vSRX instance while it is initially booting by disabling connectivity to devices hosting the instance; e.g. console servers, etc.

​2018-10-10: Initial publication

• KB16613: Overview of the Juniper Networks SIRT Quarterly Security Bulletin Publication Process [juniper.net]
• KB16765: In which releases are vulnerabilities fixed? [juniper.net]
• KB16446: Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and Juniper's Security Advisories [juniper.net]
• Report a Vulnerability - How to Contact the Juniper Networks Security Incident Response Team
• CVE-2018-0053 at cve.mitre.org