Jann Horn discovered that microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and branch prediction may allow unauthorized memory reads via sidechannel attacks. This flaw is known as Spectre. A local attacker could use this to expose sensitive information, including kernel memory. This update provides mitigations for the i386 (CVE-2017-5753 only), amd64, ppc64el, and s390x architectures.
(CVE-2017-5715, CVE-2017-5753)

USN-3523-1 mitigated CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown) for the amd64 architecture in Ubuntu 17.10. This update provides the corresponding mitigations for the ppc64el architecture. 

Jann Horn discovered that microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and indirect branch prediction may allow unauthorized memory reads via sidechannel attacks. This flaw is known as Meltdown. A local attacker could use this to expose sensitive information, including kernel memory. (CVE-2017-5754).

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Detections

Analytics

Ubuntu 17.10 : linux vulnerabilities (USN-3541-1) (Meltdown) (Spectre)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 106270

Version 3.15

Version 3.14

Version 3.15 Jan 13, 2026, 11:35 AM Exploit attributes ("Exploit framework core" set to "True") Plugin Feed: 202601131135
Version 3.14 Oct 31, 2025, 8:07 PM CVSSv2 score source (set to "CVE-2017-5754") Plugin Feed: 202510312007