HardwareNews

Intel before launching the Coffee Lake family, would already know they were vulnerable to Specter and Meltdown

Intel, at the time of the launch of the Coffee Lake processors, would already know the existence of the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities, of which it would have been informed months before.

Meltdown and Specter, the two serious vulnerabilities in all processors on the market, regardless of the company, are leading Intel on its head, especially Intel. It also seems that Intel, when it launched the Coffee Lake processors on the market on October 5, was already aware that these eighth generation processors suffered from this vulnerability. Google's Project Zero already had the report of the Specter vulnerabilities in its variants CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715 and Meltdown CVE-2017-5754, which would have been discovered in the middle of last year and made known to the hardware manufacturers, under embargo.

This information, therefore, reached less than Intel and the competition before the launch of Coffee Lake, but possibly late, because the processors would already be in the mass production process. Basically, this vulnerability occurs in the Skylake architecture, which serves as the basis for the Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake, so previous generation processors would be exempt from this vulnerability. There are many users these days, who have told us that the Haswell architecture processors do not present the vulnerability with the software that the company has released.

One of the investigators alleges that the company, being aware, would have responsibility, knowing this information when it launched the eighth-generation processors, and that could bring a class action lawsuit against the company for putting vulnerable hardware on the market. There is more, as Skylake and later architectures would not only need an operating system kernel patch, they would also require microcode updates to address this vulnerability.

Yesterday we published that TechSpot It had not detected any differences in performance with the Windows 10 patch, but the need for specific microcode to fix the problem would cause a loss of performance, despite claims from the main customers of the processor company, who they had no anticipated performance impairment. Additionally, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich could face investor lawsuits and SEC penalties for selling $ 22 million worth of shares before this vulnerability was known, thanks to insider information. It seems that the stars are aligning in favor of AMD, again.

Source: TPU

Show more

Robert Sole

Director of Contents and Writing of this same website, technician in renewable energy generation systems and low voltage electrical technician. I work in front of a PC, in my free time I am in front of a PC and when I leave the house I am glued to the screen of my smartphone. Every morning when I wake up I walk across the Stargate to make some coffee and start watching YouTube videos. I once saw a dragon ... or was it a Dragonite?

Related publications

3 comments

  1. The stars are aligned in favor of AMD, and of the competition and of the consumers, this favors us, it needed a cold water blow to Intel to get it down from the skies, these years it has reigned with a heavy hand, processors i 3 in 2017 with 2 nuclei ?, 2 nucelos? now fuck how i hate them !!!!

    1. Nothing, in the end it is not only Intel, it is also ARM and AMD, as Google and Microsoft have said, so that throwing balls out does not work.

      1. There are 3 important vulnerabilities, but AMD is only affected by 1, which can be fixed with a patch without losing performance. However, Intel is affected by all 3 because they take advantage of an error in the architecture of Intel CPUs, meaning it is a hardware error.

Leave your comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked with *

Button back to top
CLOSE

Ad blocker detected

This site is funded through the use of advertising. We always make sure that the advertising is not too intrusive for the reader and we prioritize the reader's experience on the website. However, if you block the ads, part of our funding will be reduced.