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Intel Issues Updated Spectre Firmware Fixes For Newer Processors
Intel has issued updated microcode to help protect its newer processors from Spectre security exploits. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's new microcode updates – which impact its newer chip platforms, such as Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, and Skylake – have been released to OEM customers and partners.
[...] The company initially released patches addressing the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in January, but later yanked its patches for the Variant 2 flaw – both for client compute and data center chips – after acknowledging that they caused "higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior." And while Intel last week announced it was re-issuing fixes for several Skylake-based platforms, the company had not given further details for its other newer processors – including Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake – until Tuesday.
First Intel, now AMD also faces multiple class-action suits over Spectre attacks
Intel rival AMD is also facing a number of class-action lawsuits over how it's responded to the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws. As The Register reports, four class-action complaints have been filed against the chip maker seeking damages on behalf of customers and investors. The suits follow a warning from AMD in late January that warned investors that it is "also subject to claims related to the recently disclosed side-channel exploits, such as Spectre and Meltdown, and may face claims or litigation for future vulnerabilities".
Intel revealed last week that it now faced 32 class-action lawsuits over its handling of the Meltdown and Spectre issues and three additional lawsuits over alleged insider trading.
Also at BetaNews.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday February 23 2018, @02:48PM (2 children)
So you could see this problem all those years ago? Even 12 months ago, before Meltdown and Spectre were even mentioned, you envisaged this particular problem, despite the fact that none of the chip designers of 2 very major companies saw it coming.
OK, I can accept that you might not like Intel for whatever reason, but I don't think that either Intel or AMD could have done anything differently. If the forthcoming legal proceedings show that one company or the other, or even both, knew about this problem long before when we believe they did then perhaps there are serious questions to be asked. As it stands, it just looks like a catastrophe that nobody could have foreseen.
And if you think that ARM is beefy enough to run render farms or even industrial desktop CAD computers then now is the time for you to invest your money. My money is staying in my pocket for the time being.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @06:38PM
On the other hand it is hard to avoid being vulnerable to Spectre while allowing branch speculation for higher performance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @03:32AM
I believe these papers are from about 2005 and they clearly describe issues with cache hardware.
http://www.daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf [daemonology.net]
http://www.daemonology.net/papers/cachemissing.pdf [daemonology.net]
https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/911878 [cert.org]
Also note that "affected hardware vendors had already been made aware of the issue on June 1, 2017"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_%28security_vulnerability%29 [wikipedia.org]
So to say this was unknown until recently is not accurate.