Impact of Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 & CVE-2017-5715) on Veritas InfoScale, Storage Foundation High Availability (SFHA) solutions and Access

Problem

Veritas is aware of the issues known as "Meltdown" (CVE-2017-5754) and "Spectre" (CVE-2017-5753 & CVE-2017-5715) that affect software running on Intel, AMD and ARM processors. Several vendors have released updated operating system kernels/patches, to mitigate these issues.

Error Message

Cause

Solution

Veritas is investigating the impact of these issues on the Veritas products above and the effect of these kernel patches.

At this time, performance impact to the products above is unknown. Veritas is working to determine measurable performance impact.

Veritas will update this article as new information becomes available.

For more information on Meltdown and Spectre please see the following:

• https://meltdownattack.com/
• https://in.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/INTEL-CORPORATION-4829/news/Intel-Responds-to-Security-Research-Findings-25746784/
• https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4073757/protect-your-windows-devices-against-spectre-meltdown
• https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/speculativeexecution

InfoScale/Storage Foundation functional test matrix

Completed items indicated no functionality issues with new kernel patch

*The InfoScale/SFHA patches used were required for the OS update support.

Support for retpoline enabled kernels

Some linux vendors have produced retpoline enabled kernels to prevent against Spectre vulnerability.
Veritas is developing patches which contain updated InfoScale/SFHA kernel components which have been re-compiled with a retpoline compiler. The following table lists InfoScale/SFHA support on retpoline enabled kernels