Pierluigi Paganini February 21, 2018

Intel released a stable microcode update to address the Spectre vulnerability for its Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors in all their various variants.

Intel has released microcode to address the CVE-2017-5715 Spectre vulnerability for many of its chips, let’s this time the security updates will not cause further problems.

The Spectre attack allows user-mode applications to extract information from other processes running on the same system. It can also be exploited to extract information from its own process via code, for example, a malicious JavaScript can be used to extract login cookies for other sites from the browser’s memory.

The Spectre attack breaks the isolation between different applications, allowing to leak information from the kernel to user programs, as well as from virtualization hypervisors to guest systems.

Problems such as frequent reboots were related to the fix for the CVE-2017-5715 Spectre flaw (Spectre Variant 2) and affected almost any platform, including systems running on Broadwell Haswell CPUs, as well as Ivy Bridge-, Sandy Bridge-, Skylake-, and Kaby Lake-based platforms.

A couple of weeks ago Intel released new microcode for its Skylake processors, now it has announced security updates for Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and other CPUs.

The microcode is now available for all 6th, 7th, and 8th generation Core processors and also X-series Intel Core products, as well as Xeon Scalable and Xeon D chips.

Intel released the Spectre firmware security updates for the following products:

Anniedale/Moorefield, Apollo Lake, Avoton/Rangeley, Broxton, Cherry View, Coffee Lake, Cougar Mountain, Denverton, Gemini Lake, Kaby Lake, Knights Landing, Knights Mill, Skylake, SoFIA, Tangier, Valleyview/Bay Trail, and XGold.

Intel released beta patches for Broadwell, Gladden, Haswell, some Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, and Skylake Xeon E3 processors. The beta patches have been provided to OEMs for their final validation.

The patches for the remaining chips are either in pre-beta or planning phase.

Both Intel and AMD confirmed are working on processors that will include protections against attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Chips, Intel)

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