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Ivy Bridge die... on fire!

Intel has appear a new gear up of updates for the Spectre attacks we've been talking almost for the by six weeks or and so. Spectre has ii variants (Variant 1 and Variant 2). Meltdown, another critical security flaw, is considered to be Variant 3 and, in the x86 infinite, affects merely Intel CPUs. We're mostly focused on Spectre today, equally patches for Meltdown should already have rolled out for Intel fries.

A month after 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:

[We] have at present released production microcode updates to our OEM customers and partners for Kaby Lake- and Coffee Lake-based platforms, plus additional Skylake-based platforms. This represents our 6th, 7th and eighth Generation Intel Cadre product lines likewise as our latest Intel Core X-series processor family. It also includes our recently announced Intel Xeon Scalable and Intel Xeon D processors for data eye systems.

Intel has but 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 nuts trying to figure out which precise Kaby Lake model yous have.

Intel has released a 14-page document to spell out exactly where it is in the production process for each CPU family. There'southward too much data to present in paradigm course, but here'due south a representative page showing update schedules on some of Intel's CPUs.

IVB-E

Click to enlarge

Looking at this sample, we come across that a number of fixes are in beta for the Ivy Span family unit, IVB-10 and Jasper Wood are in "pre-beta," and multiple Kaby Lake CPUs have UEFI updates in production already. A white background ways a CPU is either in the "Planning" or "Pre-Beta" stage, a yellowish background means the fix has moved to beta testing, and a light-green background ways the gear up is in production. As for the yellow background, that appears to mean the fix is new equally of this revised guidance.

Overall, we're glad to see these patches going in. They're admittedly critical to securing PCs, and Spectre is no joke. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, even so, there's some question as to whether Spectre can ever exist considered "solved." Information technology's easy to think of these as patches that "gear up" Spectre, only the more than authentic reading would exist that Spectre is a class of vulnerabilities and variants, and that we've fixed two of the ways it can attack. White hats are going to be playing whack-a-mole on this for a very long time.