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Week 6: Spectre and Meltdown Fallout Continues.

By this time, many of you have heard about the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities of which a lot of machines are susceptible. Most of the major parties involved have provided fixes through various patching means. However, there is still significant fallout due to this gap.
Intel is now reporting their firmware patch is causing updates on some of the new chips they have produced. "Firmware updates were causing problems with Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, Skylake and Kaby Lake." (Schwartz, 2018) This flaw is causing frequent reboots and instability in those chips.
Additionally, Intel is behind in getting their firmware updates to the various vendors. Some of the major brands which are affected by these gaps are still feeling their way around this and trying to ensure they patch appropriately. It is likely we will see higher than normal OS updates for most folks when it comes to their computers, tablets, and smartphones.
However, the big concern and part of the reason this gap even exist is performance. At this point, Intel is unsure what this will do to the performance of their chips. It is looking like this will impact enterprises IT shops with data centers. "The workloads that incorporate a larger number of user/kernel privilege changes and spend a significant amount of time in privileged mode will be more adversely impacted"(Schwartz, 2018) by the fix they are suggesting. Intel has indicated they are working to improve the performance of their chips while remediating this gap. It is likely they will work with various vendors to chart this course.




References:

Schwartz, M. J. (2018, January 18). Intel Confirms Fresh Spectre, Meltdown Patch Problems. Retrieved January 22, 2018, from https://www.databreachtoday.com/intel-confirms-fresh-spectre-meltdown-patch-problems-a-10596

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