Juniper Finds Backdoor that Decrypts VPN Traffic


December 17, 2015

Juniper Networks today has released an emergency patch that removes what it’s calling “unauthorized code” from ScreenOS that could allow attackers to decrypt VPN traffic from NetScreen devices.

Juniper has not commented on the origin of the code it found. However, Juniper’s products were singled out, among others, in the National Security Agency’s product catalog developed by its ANT division. In a December 2013 article written by Jacob Appelbaum, Judit Horchert and Christian Stocker in Der Spiegel, the NSA’s FEEDTHROUGH implant was tailored for Juniper firewalls and gave the U.S. government persistent backdoor access to these high-end networking machines. NetScreen appliances are high-end enterprise firewall and VPN products, used also by telecommunications carriers and in data centers; ScreenOS is the underlying operating system running those appliances.

Read full story…