Entries tagged [spectre]

As promised in my initial blog post on this matter, Apache Ignite community applied security patches against the notorious Meltdown Spectre vulnerabilities and completed performance testing of general operations and workloads that are typical for Ignite deployments.

The security patches were applied only for CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown) and CVE-2017-5753 (Spectre Variant 1) vulnerabilities. The patches for CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre Variant 2) for the hardware the community used for testing are not stable yet an can cause system reboot issues or another unpredictable behavior. 

The applied patches have shown that the performance implications are negligible - the performance drop is just in the 0 - 7% range as the figure shows:

The world was rocked after the recent disclosure of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that literally affect almost all software ever developed. Both issues are related to the way all modern CPUs are designed and this is why they have opened unprecedented security breaches -- making the software, including Apache Ignite, vulnerable to hacker attacks.

The vulnerabilities are registered in the National Vulnerability Database under the following CVEs:

• CVE-2017-5753 — Spectre variant 1
• CVE-2017-5715 — Spectre variant 2
• CVE-2017-5754 — Meltdown