Security News Intel's upcoming processors may not fix the latest Spectre variant

LASER_oneXM

Level 37
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Verified
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Well-known
Feb 4, 2016
2,520
May 25, 2018 14:36 EDT

Intel has been going through a rough patch for the past few months. Since the initial discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, the company has released patches to fix the flaw, only for new ones to be found.

Earlier this year, the company said that its next generation of processors - which should arrive towards the end of 2018 - will have a silicon-based fix for the vulnerability, but it seems that even those newer processors won't be free of trouble.

Sources speaking to ThreatPost say that the protective technology will be unable to impact the latest variant of Spectre, which was discovered earlier this week. This means that a fix will have to come once again via a microcode update, but as we've seen with previous versions, these software fixes can have a significant impact on performance.
 

Michyon

Level 2
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May 18, 2018
50
This is becoming too ridiculous. My Xeon 16 core system was heavily impacted by the patches, I had to disable them in order to get it working with satisfactory performance. Until there is malware that is exclusively causing issues, ill rely on my anti-executables, and common sense for now, for not getting malware or 0 day in the first place, that could exploit. I notice some software struggles to start up or perform certain tasks. The GUI of software's sometimes take longer or are sluggish as well with patches, and this system uses an SSD. That doesn't mean the risks are there by any means or that patches should or shouldn't be used. Everyone needs to evaluate their own environment separately.

I am starting to think that we are crippling our own hardware's capabilities for paranoia. Sometimes too much security can be as bad as too little. The best security stops the malware from ever getting on a machine in the first place. If it can't be launched in the first place it can't exploit.

Again, that isn't to say to not patch. Everyone's environment and needs are different. Personally I would patch my business, but not my personal gaming machine.
 

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