Home Cybersecurity Intel Announces Spectre Fixes for Additional Processor Lines

Intel Announces Spectre Fixes for Additional Processor Lines

Posted: March 2, 2018

intel spectre fix processorIntel has just released new updates providing Spectre hardware vulnerability patches for several additional processor lines. In February this year, the company pushed through patches for the Skylake chipsets, yet now fixes are available also for the Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, and Skylake-X processor lines, as well as for data center CPUs like Intel Xeon D and Intel Xeon Scalable. In addition, there are also new fixes for the Skylake products which improve the initial releases from earlier this year.

Intel points out once again that it has, in some cases, implemented several techniques for the mitigation of the Spectre vulnerability. All of these techniques provide protection against potential exploits, including the "Retpoline" mitigation technique developed by Google for the Spectre Variant 2 patches.

The first Meltdown and Spectre security updates were released in January this year, shortly after the discovery of the hardware security flaws was made public. However, it turned out that the Spectre vulnerability is much more complicated than initially assumed and that, respectively, providing proper fixes could take more thorough research. Intel found out that the initial Spectre Variant 2 patches were causing side effects, like unexpected reboots of the processors. As a result, the company decided to pull back all the updates and not release them again until the reason for the problems was investigated completely, and the issues were fixed.

At the beginning of February, the new patches for Spectre Variant 2 were then finally shipped, yet the company had managed to address the problems only for the Skylake CPUs line. Now, the Coffee Lake Kaby Lake units will be protected as well, so all users are encouraged to download and install all new updates as soon as they occur in order to keep their systems safe.

The next versions of devices firmware containing patches for the Spectre vulnerability should include these last fixes. Since Intel said it has been working closely with manufacturers who implement the mentioned CPU lines, the production microcode updates have already been made available to Intel’s OEM partners and customers. Therefore, it should not take long for device manufacturers to push through the new firmware with the latest fixes, in fact, it could happen this month already.

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