Intel makes available to motherboard manufacturers, a special microcode, which would solve the problem of the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities, apparently.

This year is dotted with security problems and breaches of all kinds. The most important and dangerous are Specter and Meltdown, which mainly affect Intel processors, but also AMD and ARM processors. These vulnerabilities seemed to have a simple solution, but in the end this problem has become very complicated and the solution is taking a long time to arrive, so much so that the company seemed to have hit a wall and the initial solution did not work. Now they have developed a new microcode, so that manufacturers can implement it in the BIOS and help correct the problem.

The update will be compatible with the Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and Skylake-X processors, making it a solution for the latest processors and additionally, this update will also be compatible with the Xeon and Xeon D. Along with this update , a guide on how to implement these microcode updates and the status of the patches has been distributed for other generations of processors. The solution for Broadwell is in beta, in addition to the solutions for Haswell, Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge, in addition to having developed a microcode in beta for generations of older Xeon processors.

Intel now leaves the work to motherboard manufacturers, who must develop a specific BIOS for their motherboards. Now the only thing missing is that the compatibility of this solution is complete with the motherboards and processors, and the problems of reboots or the inability to boot will not occur again, after installing one of these patches. They have taken more than a month to make a solution available to manufacturers, much later than initially planned.

Source: TH