On Sun, 04 Mar 2018 06:59:46 +0000, tali.perry@nuvoton.com said:

It is not secure because it is not fixed for these issues: https://meltdownattack.com/

Note that saying "The CPU isn't vulnerable to Meltdown/Spectre, therefor the 4.1 kernel is OK" is *incredibly* wrong. For the record, since 4.1 came out, there's been at *least* a dozen security issues in the Linux kernel that have been a *lot* scarier for security professionals than the Meltdown/Spectre issue. That only got any news coverage because it was an actual hardware design flaw that was believed to be difficult to easily fix with software changes... For example, here's a partial list of known security issues fixed in *just* 4.14.8: (You want the full list, it's here: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/product_id-47/cvs... Looks like there were some 298 CVE numbers assigned to the Linux kernel after the 4.1 release date. Note that this doe *NOT* include fixed bugs that had security implications but were not assigned a CVE number) CVE-2017-17857 The check_stack_boundary function in kernel/bpf/verifier.c in the Linux kernel through 4.14.8 allows local users to cause a denial of service (memory corruption) or possibly have unspecified other impact by leveraging mishandling of invalid variable stack read operations. CVE-2017-17856 kernel/bpf/verifier.c in the Linux kernel through 4.14.8 allows local users to cause a denial of service (memory corruption) or possibly have unspecified other impact by leveraging the lack of stack-pointer alignment enforcement. CVE-2017-17855 kernel/bpf/verifier.c in the Linux kernel through 4.14.8 allows local users to cause a denial of service (memory corruption) or possibly have unspecified other impact by leveraging improper use of pointers in place of scalars. CVE-2017-17854 kernel/bpf/verifier.c in the Linux kernel through 4.14.8 allows local users to cause a denial of service (integer overflow and memory corruption) or possibly have unspecified other impact by leveraging unrestricted integer values for pointer arithmetic. CVE-2017-17853 kernel/bpf/verifier.c in the Linux kernel through 4.14.8 allows local users to cause a denial of service (memory corruption) or possibly have unspecified other impact by leveraging incorrect BPF_RSH signed bounds calculations. CVE-2017-17852 kernel/bpf/verifier.c in the Linux kernel through 4.14.8 allows local users to cause a denial of service (memory corruption) or possibly have unspecified other impact by leveraging mishandling of 32-bit ALU ops. CVE-2017-17806 The HMAC implementation (crypto/hmac.c) in the Linux kernel before 4.14.8 does not validate that the underlying cryptographic hash algorithm is unkeyed, allowing a local attacker able to use the AF_ALG-based hash interface (CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_HASH) and the SHA-3 hash algorithm (CONFIG_CRYPTO_SHA3) to cause a kernel stack buffer overflow by executing a crafted sequence of system calls that encounter a missing SHA-3 initialization. CVE-2017-17805 The Salsa20 encryption algorithm in the Linux kernel before 4.14.8 does not correctly handle zero-length inputs, allowing a local attacker able to use the AF_ALG-based skcipher interface (CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_SKCIPHER) to cause a denial of service (uninitialized-memory free and kernel crash) or have unspecified other impact by executing a crafted sequence of system calls that use the blkcipher_walk API. Both the generic implementation (crypto/salsa20_generic.c) and x86 implementation (arch/x86/crypto/salsa20_glue.c) of Salsa20 were vulnerable.