Spectre And Meltdown security exploits have created a lot of problems for Intel as millions of Intel devices are vulnerable to these security exploits. However, Intel did promise hardware fixes for its CPUs and the company has revealed that it has redesigned its Cascade Lake and Coffee Lake Chips.
According to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, with the hardware redesign of the upcoming Coffee Lake Chips and Cascade Lake chips, the CPUs will be protected against the Spectre variant 2 and Meltdown variant 3 exploit but for Spectre Variant 1, software patches are still required.
While Variant 1 will continue to be addressed via software mitigations, we are making changes to our hardware design to further address the other two. We have redesigned parts of the processor to introduce new levels of protection through partitioning that will protect against both Variants 2 and 3. Think of this partitioning as additional “protective walls” between applications and user privilege levels to create an obstacle for bad actors.
These redesigns will be seen in Intel 8th Gen core Chips that will ship in the second half of 2018. While he didn’t talk about the performance impact of the redesign but said that they will bring the performance improvements that are expected of the upcoming Coffee Lake Chips.
Speaking of Spectre And Meltdown security exploits, Microsoft is offering up to $250,000 bounty to those who report any new bugs or exploits related to Spectre.
The reward that you might earn will be based on the Tier of the Bug or exploit. Tier 1 includes speculative execution attacks and reporting these will net you $250,000.
Furthermore, Spectre-like exploits have been discovered for AMD CPUs and according to the report, virtually all AMD CPU are vulnerable to these exploits.
However, these exploits might not be as effective as the CTS Lab is making them out to be and quite possibly be fake altogether due to the fact that the firm didn’t share any proof-of-concept in the report.
What do you think Intel redesigned its upcoming Coffee Lake chips? Let us know in the comments.
Source: Intel
