Lightboard Lessons: Explaining the Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities
The "Spectre" and "Meltdown" vulnerabilities affect almost every computer in the world. One of the very interesting things about each of these vulnerabilities is that they target the hardware (proce...
Published Mar 20, 2018
Version 1.0
hi zack. great question! because the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities are targeted at the hardware (processor) of a computer, I don't think any ASM signatures will be effective for these. The ASM signatures will catch Layer 7 network requests and block malicious content from a client accessing a web application. The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities happen outside the realm of the traditional network layers. That said, there are some browser JavaScript issues related to these vulnerabilities, and one of F5 security experts (Nir Zigler) just posted a good article about how ASM can help mitigate some of those issues. Here's the article: https://devcentral.f5.com/s/articles/meltdown-and-spectre-web-application-risk-management-29356
 
If you are concerned about these vulnerabilities on the BIG-IP hardware platform, you can reference K91229003: Side-channel processor vulnerabilities CVE-2017-5715, CVE-2017-5753, and CVE-2017-5754
 
Hope this helps!