14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical released a microcode update for all Ubuntu users with AMD processors to address the well-known Spectre security vulnerability.
The Spectre microprocessor side-channel vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed earlier this year and discovered to affect billions of devices made in the past two decades. Unearthed by Jann Horn of Google Project Zero, the second variant (CVE-2017-5715) of the Spectre vulnerability is described as a branch target injection attack.
The security vulnerability affects all microprocessors that use branch prediction and speculative execution function, and it can allow unauthorized memory reads via side-channel attacks if the system isn't patched. For example, a local attacker could use it to expose sensitive information, including kernel memory.
To fix the issue, a processor microcode firmware update is required, and Canonical released today updated amd64-microcode packages for AMD CPUs on all of its supported Ubuntu Linux releases, including Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).
All AMD users are urged to update their systems
Canonical said that the updated amd64-microcode package provides the microcode updates for AMD 17H processors family, which is required for the corresponding Linux kernel security updates that the company released in the past several weeks for all supported Ubuntu releases, urging users to update their systems immediately following the instructions provided here.
Users on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS must update to amd64-microcode - 3.20180524.1~ubuntu0.18.04.1, Ubuntu 17.10 users should update to amd64-microcode - 3.20180524.1~ubuntu0.17.10.1, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users would have to update to amd64-microcode - 3.20180524.1~ubuntu0.16.04.1, and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS must update to amd64-microcode - 3.20180524.1~ubuntu0.14.04.1. Please reboot your computers after successfully installing the microcode update.