Growing pains for next Net

A vulnerability discovered in some of Juniper Networks' routing software highlights that the next-generation Internet, known as Internet Protocol version 6, still has a ways to go before it will be ready for widespread adoption.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team and Secunia, a security advisory company, issued alerts Wednesday for Juniper M-series and T-series routers built between Feb. 24 and June 20 that are running IPv6.

The vulnerability is caused by what is called a "memory leak," which an attacker could exploit to cause a denial-of-service attack. These memory leaks occur when IPv6 packets are sent in such an order that they take up more memory than usual. As the memory is filled up, the router runs slower. And eventually when the memory is exhausted, the router crashes and reboots itself, potentially causing major service outages or significantly slowed network performance.

Consumers who are registered at Juniper's support site can log on to the site to get more information on how to fix the problem. Users also can disable IPv6 in the routers' Packet Forwarding Engine, according to the advisories.

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