Meltdown and Spectre
You may be aware of recent media articles around two new vulnerabilities – named Meltdown and Spectre – affecting various vendor CPUs, including Intel. You can find more information on these at https://meltdownattack.com/.
This blog is for our customers to receive updates on how these vulnerabilites affect their Cryoserver solutions.
As the largest global chip maker, Intel chips are in 80% of desktop computers worldwide and are used in our Cryoserver appliances.
The technical details of the vulnerabilities have not been made public and are only in the hands of the vendors concerned. To date there are currently no known instances of these exploits being used by malicious hackers.
For both Windows and Linux solutions we will apply patches as and when they are released. Once patches have been installed, we will be able to schedule in time with you for the reboots of your Cryoserver so that these patches take effect.
For those customer environments we do not have access to, we will need to perform a dedicated support session to do the manual update for your relevant OS and then perform the tasks together.
Once these patches are installed, we highly advise you to monitor the performance usage of your solution. It has been reported and tests have confirmed that, depending on your CPU’s workload, usage can increase between 5% and 30%. Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to predict the CPU usage increase before patches are applied, so monitoring once the update is complete is the only option available.
Vendor Responses
| Red Hat | Vulnerability Response |
| Debian | Security Tracker |
| Ubuntu | Knowledge Base |
| SUSE | Vulnerability Response |
| VMWare | Security Advisory |
| Citrix | Security Bulletin |
Updates:
| 08/01/2018 | Cryoserver Support are awaiting to secure these vulnerabilities and will be rolling out patches as soon as they are released by the vendors affected, including Microsoft, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Debian, SLES, CentOS, VMware and many more. |