Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities

Veeam is aware of the side-channel analysis vulnerabilities known as Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715) affecting most of the modern processors.

For more information regarding these vulnerabilities please visit security advisories posted by Intel (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/facts-about-side-channel-analysis-and-intel-products.html), AMD (http://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution), Microsoft (https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/advisory/ADV180002), VMware (https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2018-0002.html). Veeam recommends applying all latest operating system security patches and firmware updates right away to avoid security breaches, however these updates might introduce reduction in CPU performance.

As part of our regular process, Veeam development team conducts performance analysis of the available patches on servers with installed Veeam products. We will continue to update further, as more details become available.

Preliminary tests in our lab haven't shown any significant performance degradation on Veeam components after applying the patches. However, the performance impact may be noticeable depending on the hardware configuration. 

As of January 23, 2018, Intel does not recommend installing patches:

"We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior."

 

Deployed Linux appliances: no patches are currently required, since only root can log in to these appliances. To protect other VMs running on the same host from getting into each other’s memory, patching the host is required.