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How to live in a post-Meltdown and -Spectre world
Bennett R., Callahan C., Jones S., Levine M., Miller M., Ozment A. Communications of the ACM61 (12):40-44,2018.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Mar 5 2019

Handling zero-day vulnerabilities means making decisions under uncertainty and taking preventive actions for potential exploits. As Meltdown and Spectre attacks may exploit the vulnerabilities that stem from the fundamental design features of most of Intel and other central processing units (CPUs), security managers are left with very little real-time information or concrete preventive or defensive mitigation measures. The hardware design in fundamental instruction executions can be exploited, thus affecting all computing platforms, end user devices, cloud platforms, servers, and online and application software. Meltdown and Spectre thus created pervasive attack surfaces. In addition, the vendor-released patches may cause significant performance slowdowns, posing operational risks. The security managers of large enterprises like Goldman Sachs, with over 35 thousand employees, are faced with poor risk tradeoff, a dilemma of whether to install the patches and cause operational risk or to face the security risks of an exploit that may potentially affect all computing platforms throughout the enterprise.

Realizing potential exploits require executing code on the victim’s local machine, the triage actions are taken contextually by identifying the most likely environment of executing untrusted code and prioritizing security or operational risks. Cloud providers preemptively patched the public cloud’s hypervisors where instance-to-instance processes may be exploited. For employee end desktop or endpoint devices that may cause more security risks than performance issues, the patch was installed, while for the critical servers for trading and complex calculations where the priority is performance, the patch was not installed. For browsers and email where highly untrusted code may enter, controls such as proxy servers and blocking risky sites, ads, or downloads are used.

Vulnerability management is especially challenging when faced with a new breed of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Managers are faced with a poor risk tradeoff, that is, choosing between high performance impact and imperfect security settings. Security managers may benefit from this article, which provides insights into common cybersecurity practices as well as into decision-making in uncertain situations.

Reviewer:  Soon Ae Chun Review #: CR146458 (1905-0202)
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