Industry Responds to Unprecedented CPU Security Vulnerability

By EETimes

January 4, 2018

Unique collaboration between chip makers and software firms may be a sign of things to come for a tech landscape facing a barrage of security threats.

Early leaks on the so-called security bug focused on Intel, but it’s now clear that the security vulnerabilities announced Wednesday have a much broader impact on many contemporary, high-performance processors and, not just Intel.

There are actually three different side-channel attacks that security researchers at Google Project Zero and other firms have identified. These attacks use a combination of knowledge of the internal operation of modern CPU and some level of brute force testing.

It’s important to note that, to date, these vulnerabilities have not been seen exploited in the wild. But with this disclosure, attacks can be crafted by knowledgeable hackers — which is why there has been a race to patch these vulnerabilities throughout the software ecosystem.

Part of the team that was needed to fix the vulnerabilities were CPU designers AMD, ARM and Intel. Key system software vendors included Apple, Citrix, Linux, Microsoft and VMWare.

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