Intel releases Spectre patches for Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake

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.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Chips, Intel)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.