Intel CEO addresses Meltdown and Spectre directly at CES

The flaws, revealed this week, have resulted in Intel being hit by at least three class-action lawsuits by plaintiffs in California, Oregon and in.

Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich said Monday night that the computer chip giant has heard of no attacks based on two critical security flaws revealed in its chips last week – called Spectre and Meltdown – that affect almost every computer and smartphone on the planet. That was made perfectly clear the moment he turned his remarks to the two elephant-sized vulnerabilities in the room: Spectre and Meltdown.

Two hardware bugs were discovered on the chipsets that essentially enable the memory of a computer to be leaked.

But even as he was thanking these other companies, he pointed that it affects different processor architectures – not just Intel’s.

Modern processors are created to perform “speculative execution”.

However, the official office of Helen Dixon noted that the issue will reach far beyond the jurisdiction of the Irish regulator alone and that they’d be involved with several regulating agencies across the European Union.

It’s an industry technique used to optimize the processor’s performance.

Intel processors built since 1995 are reportedly affected by Meltdown, while Spectre affects devices running on Intel, AMD, and ARM processors. Again, sensitive data could be compromised by malicious apps.

Krznaich brought a Mobileye prototype auto to the stage at the end of Monday’s talk, cameras tucked discretely inside, and promised to drive it to work at Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Google and Amazon are reportedly doing the same thing for their cloud services. However, it is still best to remain vigilant and alert should cybercriminals found a way to exploit these newfound vulnerabilities.

This is not the first time that Apple has addressed the issue.

Google has published mitigations on the infrastructure/products that may be affected (YouTube, Google Ads, Chrome, etc.).

Apple has released iOS 11.2.2 for iPhone and iPad.

The tech company released a notice on their website yesterday, January 5, detailing the security issues. Note that patching on Android is fragmented, so users need to notify their OEMs for their availability. It can be downloaded by navigating to Settings General Software Update. Apple has already released software patches for iOS (11.2), macOS (10.13.2), and tvOS (11.2) to address the Meltdown flaw.

In addition to working on superconducting qubits, Intel is also investing in “spin qubits”, a relatively new development which requires (bear with us) quantum control of the electron and the nuclear spin of a single atom in silicon. Spectre is generally pretty hard to exploit, but tests have shown that browsers are vulnerable to Spectre-based JavaScript attacks.