[Security-Discuss] Patching RH Linux Boxes Against new CPU (Meltdown & Spectre)

[Weeks, Thomas]

And here's the same article for the Ubuntu side of the house (not as much progress there yet):
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAndMeltdown

And a related article:
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2018/01/ubuntu-updates-for-meltdown-spectre.html


If anyone else has relevant/related info, please share.
 
 T.Weeks
    



From: Weeks, Thomas
Sent: Thursday, January 4, 2018 4:03 PM
To: security-discuss at lists.rbtc.tech
Subject: Patching RH Linux Boxes Against new CPU (Meltdown & Spectre) 
  

I don't normally send out security announcements.. but this is so huge it demands some extra attention..

Here's a really great security bulletin by a good X-Racker friend of mine (now a security lead at Red Hat) on the big processor/kernel Side-Channel attack vectors (by Meltdown/Spectre).
https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/speculativeexecution

If you run Red Hat base distros, stay tuned to the Advisory/Update column of the "Resolve" tab of this super critical security bulletin.


TL;DR
The packages you'll want to watch for updates on are kernel, libvirt and qemu-kvm (as well as kernel-rt and dracut on RHEL7):

Post any of your findings, tips or suggestions here please.. we're all in this one for the long term!


p.s. Invite security friends to both this list:  http://lists.rbtc.tech/mailman/listinfo/security-discuss
and the main [Security-Announce] list:  http://lists.rbtc.tech/mailman/listinfo/security-announce
Both run the mailman email list server, and as such have archives that are google indexed, and thus VERY useful for recalling useful things you can't quite remember.. :)
  
 T.Weeks
 Thomas "Tweeks" Weeks
 Director, Technology Futures and Community Advocacy
 Division of Information Technology, Virginia Tech