Summary

Security Advisory ID : BSA-2018-522

Component : HW: CPU

Revision : 1.2: Interim

In total, security researchers disclosed three variants of CPU Data cache timing abuse. The variants lead to vulnerabilities that take advantage of the implementation of speculative execution of instructions on many modern processors to perform side-channel information disclosure. An unprivileged local attacker could read privileged memory belonging to other processes or memory allocated to the operating system kernel.

The three disclosed variants are:
Variant 1: bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753)
Variant 2: branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715)
Variant 3: rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754)
Variant 1 and 2 are collectively known as Spectre, the third variant is known as Meltdown.

To exploit any of these vulnerabilities, an attacker must be able to download and run a carefully crafted program on the device.

Affected Products

Brocade virtual ADX (vADX)
Fixed in vADX 4000f

Products Confirmed Not Vulnerable

Brocade Network Advisor and Brocade ServerIron ADX are confirmed not affected by these three vulnerabilities.

Brocade SAN Products:

• With regards to Spectre; (CVE-2017-5753) and (CVE-2017-5715), the processors used on the SAN switch products are susceptible to the side-channel attack, however Brocade SAN products will only load and run officially signed FOS firmware. Since only an officially signed and validated Fabric OS code image can run on Brocade SAN hardware, the SAN switch products are not exploitable with respect to this specific set of vulnerabilities.
• With regards to the Meltdown vulnerability (CVE-2017-5754), the processors used on the SAN switch products are not affected.

Workaround

Brocade vADX customers are recommended to upgrade their Kernel using the instruction “yum upgrade kernel” to avoid these vulnerabilities.

Note

Brocade Manageability products are not vulnerable to Meltdown or Spectre. However, since the environment that runs the products is not under Brocade's Control, Brocade recommends Customers to apply the recommendation from the vendors.

Revision History