Is AIX/Power safe from Spectre / Meltdown

aixcpukernelpowerpcvulnerability

Since Intel, AMD and ARM is affected by the Spectre and Meltdown cpu kernel memory leak bugs/flaws, could we say that Power architecture is safe from these?

Best Answer

No, you could not say it's safe.

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/psirt/potential-impact-processors-power-family/

Complete mitigation of this vulnerability for Power Systems clients involves installing patches to both system firmware and operating systems. The firmware patch provides partial remediation to these vulnerabilities and is a pre-requisite for the OS patch to be effective.

[...]

Firmware patches for POWER7+, POWER8, and POWER9 platforms are now available via FixCentral. POWER7 patches will be available beginning February 7.

[...]

AIX patches will be available beginning January 26 and will continue to be rolled out through February 12.

Update : patches available, http://aix.software.ibm.com/aix/efixes/security/spectre_meltdown_advisory.asc

Related Solutions

Linux – How to determine CPU features on PowerPC and Power 8 (and above)

I am not sure why /proc/cpuinfo or lscpu does not reveal flag information. I have found the list of flags known to the linux kernel https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/tree/arch/powerpc/include/asm/cputable.h?id=refs/tags/v4.9

I've just found that you can lookup ELF auxiliary vectors which will show you some hardware capabilities.

$ LD_SHOW_AUXV=1 /bin/true
AT_SYSINFO_EHDR: 0x7ffdcd0e6000
AT_HWCAP:        bfebfbff
AT_PAGESZ:       4096
AT_CLKTCK:       100
AT_PHDR:         0x5591e6663040
AT_PHENT:        56
AT_PHNUM:        9
AT_BASE:         0x7f2ae4f79000
AT_FLAGS:        0x0
AT_ENTRY:        0x5591e6664670
AT_UID:          1000
AT_EUID:         1000
AT_GID:          1000
AT_EGID:         1000
AT_SECURE:       0
AT_RANDOM:       0x7ffdcd044399
AT_HWCAP2:       0x0
AT_EXECFN:       /bin/true
AT_PLATFORM:     x86_64

^^ your AT_HWCAP will have flag info. Masked. I've seen samples on the Internet that have this entry decoded for you. I don't have access to ppc hardware to test on unfortunately.

lscpu should be available on AIX, perhaps it would show CPU flags?

Linux Security – How to Mitigate Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities

Alan Cox shared a link from AMD's blog: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution

Variant One: Bounds Check Bypass

Resolved by software / OS updates to be made available by system vendors and manufacturers. Negligible performance impact expected.

Variant Two: Branch Target Injection

Differences in AMD architecture mean there is a near zero risk of exploitation of this variant. Vulnerability to Variant 2 has not been demonstrated on AMD processors to date.

Variant Three: Rogue Data Cache Load

Zero AMD vulnerability due to AMD architecture differences.

It would be good to have confirmation of these AMD's statements by a third party though.

The 'mitigation' on affected systems, would require a new kernel and a reboot, but on many distributions there is not yet released packages with the fixes:

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/patch-meltdown-cpu-vulnerability-cve-2017-5754-linux/

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to determine CPU features on PowerPC and Power 8 (and above)

Linux Security – How to Mitigate Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities

Debian:

Other sources of information I found:

Related Question