Intel hasn’t stepped back on their efforts to show how concerned they’re for the people affected by the critical Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities disclosed ahead of schedule. The first lot of security patches released by Intel ended up rebooting people’s machines.
Later, the world’s second largest chip maker had to advise users to refrain from applying the updates. For a bug-free future, Intel CEO sort of promised last month that the Intel chips releasing later this year will be free of spectre and meltdown bugs.
Now, Intel has released a new Spectre security patch for their Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffe Lake processor architectures that power the 6th, 7th, and 8th generation Intel Core processor lines. The update also applies to Intel Core X series, as well as, their Xeon Scalable and Xeon D server chips.
The new microcode update includes a mitigation technique called ‘Retpoline’ for Spectre variant 2 (Branch Target Injection). Developed by Google, it is one of the multiple mitigation techniques Intel has delivered as a part of the security patch that went through “extensive testing by customers and industry partners to ensure the updated versions are ready for production.”
Intel will release the fresh microcode to their OEM partners, and it will land on affected machines via system updates. Maybe this time, the update doesn’t cause further problems like it did in the past.
Source: https://fossbytes.com/spectre-patch-intel-core-chips-skylake-kaby-lake-coffe-lake/
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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