Spectre/Meltdown impact on network devices

Sun Jan 7 22:36:56 UTC 2018

On Sun, Jan 7, 2018 at 2:02 PM, Jean | ddostest.me via NANOG <
nanog at nanog.org> wrote:

> I'm curious to hear the impact on network devices of this new hardware
> flaws that everybody talk about. Yes, the Meltdown/Spectre flaws.
>

Hi Jean,

Meltdown and Spectre are privilege escalation flaws. If you can induce the
physical hardware to run arbitrary code you provide at an unprivileged
level, they can be used to extract information from other processes or
virtual machine containers running at different (higher) privilege levels.

Network appliances like routers and switches generally do not run untrusted
code so the preconditions for Meltdown and Spectre generally aren't there.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>