Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities: A SonicWall Alert

On January 4th, 2018 security researchers made public earlier findings on two processor vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown.

Variants of this issue are known to affect many modern processors, including certain processors by Intel, AMD and ARM.

So far, we are tracking and providing updates on the following three known variants of the issue:

    Variant 1: bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753)
    Variant 2: branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715)
    Variant 3: rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754)

Impact to SonicWall customers

The SonicWall Capture Threat Research team has evaluated these vulnerabilities and determined that our firewalls are not vulnerable to the Meltdown or Spectre vulnerabilities.

SonicWall firewalls utilize custom high performance security processors (not x86 or other processors with known flaws). Further, SonicOS is a specialized security operating system that does not run arbitrary code and has no exploitable shell. SonicWall firewalls protect against known and unknown malware, and network based exploits against Meltdown and Spectre have artifacts that can be identified and therefore prevented.

The SonicWall Capture Threat Research team is releasing protection against attacks that leverage these vulnerabilities to help defend our customers’ extended infrastructure.  

• 13149    Suspicious Javascript Code (Speculative Execution)
• GAV: Exploit.Spectre.A (Exploit)

Other SonicWall appliances are hardened and do not run 3rd party code, which is a prerequisite to this attack. Therefore, SonicWall email security, remote access and centralized management appliances are not at risk.

Recommended Action

In order to minimize the potential impact of these vulnerabilities, SonicWall recommends customers take the following actions:

• Patch all Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and Mac OS clients with the latest updates from client vendors.
• Enable the SonicWall Capture ATP Service, Intrusion Prevention Service (IPS) and the anti-malware protection on their firewalls

Additional details on these vulnerabilities can be found at:

• https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.co.at/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.html
• https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/meltdown-and-spectre-every-modern-processor-has-unfixable-security-flaws/

Should you have further questions or need assistance, please contact your preferred SonicWall reseller or SonicWall Support. You can also expect to see a blog post about this vulnerability on https://blog.sonicwall.com/ shortly.