Meltdown and Spectre CVE-2017-5754, CVE-2017-5753, and CVE-2017-5715

Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. These hardware vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer. While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs. This might include your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents. 

Meltdown and Spectre work on personal computers, mobile devices, and in the cloud. Depending on the cloud provider's infrastructure, it might be possible to steal data from other customers.

These vulnerabilities are resolved by patches provided between January 2018 and March 2018. You should apply the latest operating system patches to your Sentinel systems to address these vulnerabilities.

The operating system patches should be downloaded from your OS vendor if you have a traditional installation of Sentinel. If you have one or more Sentinel appliances, you should apply the latest updates from the NCC appliance update channel or contact Customer Support for assistance if your appliance doesn’t have direct connectivity to the NCC channel. The NCC channel updates are available as of April, 1st 2018.

For more information about how SUSE has addressed this, a detailed timeline, and steps to verify that your system is protected, see

https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=7022512. 

For similar information from Red Hat, see 

https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/speculativeexecution. 

Note: With the latest OS patches, the previously published recommendation to manually remove the file microcode_ctl-1.17-102.83.9.1 does not apply.

References:

 

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5715

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5753

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5754

https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=7022512

 

https://newsroom.intel.com/news/root-cause-of-reboot-issue-identified-updated-guidance-for-customers-and-partners