Re: Spectre/Meltdown impact on network devices

[William Herrin <bill () herrin us>]

On Sun, Jan 7, 2018 at 2:02 PM, Jean | ddostest.me via NANOG <
nanog () 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 () dirtside com  bill () herrin us
Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>