USN-3540-1

Jann Horn discovered that microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and branch prediction may allow unauthorized memory reads via sidechannel attacks. This flaw is known as Spectre. A local attacker could use this to expose sensitive information, including kernel memory. This update provides mitigations for the i386 (CVE-2017-5753 only), amd64, ppc64el, and s390x architectures. (CVE-2017-5715, CVE-2017-5753)

USN-3522-1 mitigated CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown) for the amd64 architecture in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. This update provides the corresponding mitigations for the ppc64el architecture. Original advisory details:

Jann Horn discovered that microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and indirect branch prediction may allow unauthorized memory reads via sidechannel attacks. This flaw is known as Meltdown. A local attacker could use this to expose sensitive information, including kernel memory. (CVE-2017-5754)