Kern.log found "spectre-v2" and some other "CPU features"

1

I don’t even know where to put this, so I apologize if I’m in the wrong place.
I had a communication error that led to general lack of responsiveness to rules and buttons, so I decided to peruse the logs (despite knowing I wouldn’t be able to recognize an issue if I saw one).

I saw this go by in the kern.log:
Jan 1 06:40:14 openhabian kernel: [ 0.000000] CPU features: detected: Spectre-v2
Jan 1 06:40:14 openhabian kernel: [ 0.000000] CPU features: detected: Spectre-v3a
Jan 1 06:40:14 openhabian kernel: [ 0.000000] CPU features: detected: Spectre-v4
Jan 1 06:40:14 openhabian kernel: [ 0.000000] CPU features: detected: Spectre-BHB

I remember issues with meltdown and spectre being attacks awhile back and Google’s not assuaging any of my worries. Should I do something? Is this supposed to be here? Is this a real problem, or have I just noobed my pants?

Either way, thank you for your help and Happy New Year!!!

Matt5

2

Spectre and meltdown are CPU level vulnerabilites so way outside the scope of openHAB or even openHABian.

If you want you should be able to turn off the speculative look ahead feature in the BIOS/UEFI or there should be a tool released by your CPU manufacturer to disable that feature. It comes at a significant performance cost though.

As a home user these vulnerabilities are meh. To exercise them the attacker has to already be on your machine in which case they are done and don’t need these fancy attacks. These are mostly a concern in cloud environments where a compromised vm can use these to learn secrets from other vms running on the same hardware. In a cloud you have no idea and no control over who owns those other vms and how secure they may be so the risk is greater.