On the face of it, it was a devastating blow to Intel and its brand. It was revealed last week that Intel had informed some companies - including Chinese firms - before it told the US government, which has caused consternation in some circles.Īdd to that a badly-timed sale of shares by Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich – executed under an automatic trading plan – and the company crawled out of the whole issue a little bit bruised and battered. The companies knew about the problem from June and July last year, when it was discovered by researchers the public were alerted to the issue only because the news was about to leak, before researchers and chip firms had devised a fix to solve the problem. The discovery that the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities could potentially give hackers access to information that would have been considered secure has rocked the industry and its faith in hardware security.
It doesn't improve with age." Intel bosses may wish they had kept that in mind when the tech giant was formulating its response to the recent revelations that there were major security flaws in its microprocessor chips. Google, Amazon and Microsoft all say they've updated their systems to protect against Spectre and Meltdown."Bad news isn't wine.
, where many computing processes run side by side in different compartments on the same hardware. The issue is a particular concern for data centers run by companies like where you're moving from one level of protection to another," Smith said. The Intel fix will address those "corner cases.
#INTEL OUT GET SPECTRE MELTDOWN CHIP SOFTWARE#
The problems occur only when the chip is switching from one level of privilege to another, for example the change from running a computer user's software like Photoshop to the computer's operating system, which gets deeper access to the processor. "We're not turning off the benefits of speculation." "We're putting those mitigations in our designs," Smith said. Intel is effectively taking the software fixes being released now and building them directly into hardware, he said. Intel also is fixing the problem in future chips, starting with products that will arrive later this year, Smith said. That could mean an attacker could get access to passwords, encryption keys and other extremely sensitive data. If an attacker manages to place malicious software on your device, it could use Meltdown or Spectre to listen in on other software whose data is supposed to be secure from eavesdropping within the system. , and servers - computing devices using chips designed by Intel, Arm and, to a lesser degree, AMD. The vulnerabilities, announced Wednesday by Google and other researchers, open a new avenue of attack on PCs, we're seeing now the first iterations of patches." "This is not an issue that is not fixable. "This is very very different from FDIV," Krzanich said, criticizing media coverage of Meltdown and Spectre as overblown. Intel said Thursday that 90 percent of computers released in the last 5 years will have fixes available by the end of next week.
Said the new problems are much more easily fixed - and indeed are already well on their way to being fixed, at least in the case of Intel-powered PCs and servers.
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