Re: Spectre/Meltdown impact on network devices

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer () nic fr>]

On Sun, Jan 07, 2018 at 02:02:24PM -0500,
 Jean | ddostest.me via NANOG <nanog () nanog org> wrote 
 a message of 21 lines which said:

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

https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20180104-cpusidechannel

> I understand that one need access but still it could be possible for one
> to social engineer a NOC user, hijack the account with limited access
> and maybe run the "exploit".

There are other ways to tun code on the target machine. JavaScript is
the most obvious one (and there are JavaScript exploits for Meltdown)
but, of course, the typical router does not have a Web browser. So,
the best solution, for the attacker, is probably to exploit a bug in
the BGP parser (as we have seen with attribute 99, BGP parsers have
bugs): with a buffer overflow, you may be able to run code you
choose. Purely theoretical at this stage, I didn't try.