14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical announced today the availability of a new kernel security update for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems running the Linux 3.13 kernel to fix the second variant of the Spectre vulnerability on both 32-bit and 64-bit installations.
On January 23, 2018, Canonical updated the kernel packages of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) to version linux-image 3.13.0-141.190, patching the Spectre Variant 2 security vulnerability discovered by Jann Horn, for the 64-bit (amd64) hardware architecture.
The Spectre flaw can be exploited by a local attacker to expose sensitive information from kernel memory on modern microprocessors with branch prediction and speculative execution capabilities. Canonical now added support for 32-bit hardware architectures as well for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS systems.
"USN-3542-1 mitigated CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre Variant 2) for the amd64 architecture in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This update provides the compiler-based retpoline kernel mitigation for the amd64 and i386 architectures," reads today's security advisory. "To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades."
Users are urged to update their installations immediately
If you're still using the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system on either desktop or server machines, and it runs the Linux 3.13 kernel, you are urged to update your installation to the linux-image 3.13.0-143.192 kernel package, which is now available in the main repositories as generic, generic-lpae, and lowlatency images.
Canonical recommends users to reboot their installations after installing a new kernel version for all the necessary changes to take effect. Also, please note that you'll have to recompile and reinstall any third-party kernel modules you might have installed after updating the kernel packages.
On February 22, 2018, Canonical released similar kernel updates with compiler-based retpoline mitigation for Spectre Variant 2 on both 64-bit and 32-bit architectures for Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS systems powered by the Xenial HWE (Hardware Enablement) kernel, as well as for Ubuntu 17.10, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 ESM machines.