Browsing Posts in vSecurity

Reading Time: 3 minutesThis year has started with the revelation of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities afftecting most of the (old and new) processors including Intel, AMD and ARM… but also others. In little less than one year we are still far from the solution because there are some patches, but those patches have serious performance impacts and sometimes are those patches require more and more time to become effective (instead of causing new issues).

Reading Time: 4 minutesVMware NSX-T Data Center is the next generation product that provides a scalable network virtualization and micro-segmentation platform for multi-hypervisor environments, container deployments, and native workloads. It has not yet become features parity with NSX-v, but the gap is closing faster and there are also several new features and capabilities available ONLY on NSX-T. And the product is growing faster: on June was release the NSX-T Data Center 2.2.0 and now there is the new NSX-T Data Center 2.3.0 release (see the release notes).

Reading Time: 9 minutesWith all those Meltdown, Spectre, Foreshadow, … bugs that affect several CPU, you may be interested in what can be the overall performance impact for all the related patches. There isn’t a simple answer, because it really varies by the processor vendor (Intel CPUs are more affected than AMD CPUs), probably also by CPU the family, for sure by the type of workloads (CPU bound workloads will be more affected, but it depends also on which instructions are used), … but also the type of environment.

Reading Time: 7 minutesThe L1 Terminal Fault (aka Foreshadow) bug is another speculative execution side channel attack that affects Intel Core processors and Intel Xeon processors only. For VMware vSphere, there are some patches available as described in this document: VMSA-2018-0020. All patches have been released on August, 14th 2018.

Reading Time: 4 minutesThis is the year of the security threats originated by hardware level bugs. The year has begun with the Spectre and Metldown bug with several months of possible solutions, new BIOS, new patches… and new variants of those bugs (like Spectre V4 and V5). But we are far from the solution because other bugs came out. And more will come out… All the software used at the microprocessor level and all the optimizations will probably be a good vector for new attack patterns. As already written, we are still far from the solution.

Reading Time: 16 minutesThis is an article realized for StarWind blog and focused on the possible security threats in a virtual environment. See also the original post.

Reading Time: 2 minutesNow that Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are almost fixed, there is a new critical vulnerability for several Intel CPU called BranchScope, discovered by some researchers from four universities. It’s again a speculative execution issue, in the method a processor uses to predict where its current computational task. By exploiting this flaw, attackers with local access could pull data stored from memory that’s otherwise inaccessible to all applications and users.

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