Meltdown and Spectre

[regulator]

Is SAS vulnerable to the Meltdown and Spectre exploits? Do we need to be running the latest SAS software to be safe processing our code?

[SASKiwi]

Check out this response from SAS:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/Administration-and-Deployment/CPU-flaws-OS-patches-and-SAS-performanc...

[Kurt_Bremser]

What's really vulnerable are the system kernels, as they rely on the memory protection of the CPU, which can be undermined by these design flaws. Fixing that will cause a performance decrease overall, as the context switches into the kernel will take longer than previous. That's my crude understanding of the issue.

So the systems need to be patched, and the performance penalty evaluated.

[nhvdwalt · Accepted solution]

Official statement from SAS...

https://support.sas.com/en/security-bulletins/Meltdown-and-Spectre-vulnerabilities.html