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Ivy Bridge die... on fire!

Intel has announced a new set of updates for the Spectre attacks nosotros've been talking about for the by six weeks or so. Spectre has two variants (Variant i and Variant 2). Meltdown, another critical security flaw, is considered to exist Variant iii and, in the x86 space, affects only Intel CPUs. We're mostly focused on Spectre today, equally patches for Meltdown should already have rolled out for Intel chips.

A month subsequently Intel had to yank certain fixes for causing crashes and reboots, the company is back with stable updates for the Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake CPU families. In a recent blog post, Intel's Navin Shenoy wrote:

[Nosotros] accept now released production microcode updates to our OEM customers and partners for Kaby Lake- and Java Lake-based platforms, plus additional Skylake-based platforms. This represents our 6th, seventh and 8th Generation Intel Core product lines as well as our latest Intel Core X-series processor family unit. It also includes our recently announced Intel Xeon Scalable and Intel Xeon D processors for data centre systems.

Intel has simply released patches for Kaby Lake-H, S, X, and G, Kaby Lake Refresh U, Kaby Lake U, I, and U23E. Information technology also strongly recommends keeping an eye out for UEFI updates, which is probably simpler than going basics trying to figure out which precise Kaby Lake model you lot accept.

Intel has released a 14-folio certificate to spell out exactly where it is in the production process for each CPU family. In that location'due south likewise much data to present in prototype form, only here'southward a representative folio showing update schedules on some of Intel's CPUs.

IVB-E

Click to overstate

Looking at this sample, nosotros see that a number of fixes are in beta for the Ivy Bridge family, IVB-Ten and Jasper Wood are in "pre-beta," and multiple Kaby Lake CPUs take UEFI updates in production already. A white background means a CPU is either in the "Planning" or "Pre-Beta" phase, a yellow groundwork ways the fix has moved to beta testing, and a light-green groundwork means the fix is in production. Every bit for the xanthous groundwork, that appears to hateful the fix is new every bit of this revised guidance.

Overall, we're glad to encounter these patches going in. They're absolutely critical to securing PCs, and Spectre is no joke. At the same time, however, there's some question as to whether Spectre can ever exist considered "solved." It's easy to think of these as patches that "prepare" Spectre, but the more accurate reading would exist that Spectre is a class of vulnerabilities and variants, and that nosotros've stock-still two of the ways it can attack. White hats are going to be playing whack-a-mole on this for a very long fourth dimension.