Don&#x27;t sell JunOS short. It is far more complex than &quot;software networking on BSD&quot; and has a lot of proprietary bits.<p>Junos (FreeBSD) is the Routing Engine; Juniper hardware also contains an ASIC-based Packet Forwarding Engine, which loads microcode from the Routing Engine upon boot. Not everything&#x27;s in Junos all the time, but since the PFE loads its embedded OS from the Routing Engine kernel, you could just pwn the Routing Engine and then also have some sense of persistence in the PFE on reboot, probably. I don&#x27;t know much about how the PFEs work internally.<p>I&#x27;m certainly no FreeBSD&#x2F;JunOS expert. I am an unabashed fanboy of JunOS&#x27;s *nix-y structure, though, vs. the monolithic binary that is IOS. (There was a great Blackhat 2011 talk on IOS reverse engineering, if you are interested in that sort of thing. [1])<p>[1] [PDF Warning] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.blackhat.com&#x2F;bh-eu-11&#x2F;Sebastian_Muniz&#x2F;BlackHat_EU_2011_MunizOrtega_Cisco_iOS-WP.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.blackhat.com&#x2F;bh-eu-11&#x2F;Sebastian_Muniz&#x2F;BlackHat...</a>