Pondering what we do about mitigating Spectre and Meltdown.
By Steve Pitcher
There's been a lot of talk about Spectre and Meltdown since Google developers first announced the vulnerabilities on January 3, 2018. Rightfully so, as this type of vulnerability is arguably the biggest security concern in the history of computing.
On January 10, 2018, in the PSIRT blog entry, IBM released information regarding the current Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, which affect almost every processor in the world, including IBM Power Systems. On January 13, they also released a set of operating system PTFs for IBM i 7.1 (MF64553), 7.2 (MF64552), and 7.3 (MF64551) along with firmware PTFs previously released. On January 26, IBM released additional PTFs for IBM i 7.1 (MF64571), 7.2 (MF64565), and 7.3 (MF64568).