All week, the tech world has been piecing through rumors of a potentially catastrophic flaw in an entire generation of processors — but with all developers subject to a non-disclosure agreement, there were few hard facts to go on.
Now, new details have emerged on how severe and far reaching the vulnerability truly is. ZDNet is reporting that two critical vulnerabilities — dubbed “Meltdown” and “Spectre” — affect nearly every device made in the past 20 years. The vulnerabilities allow an attacker to compromise the privileged memory of a processor by exploiting the way processes run in parallel. The result, one researcher told ZDNet, is that "an attacker might be able to steal any data on the system.”
Intel chips have been at the focus of initial research and subsequent reporting on the vulnerability, although it remains unclear whether non-Intel chips could be susceptible. In a public statement, Intel said “many different vendors’ processors and operating systems... are susceptible to these exploits.” ARM confirmed that its Cortex-A processors are affected, while AMD has denied any of its processors are vulnerable.
The new details come less than an hour after an emergency patch from Microsoft, which pushed out a fix to all devices running Windows 10. There have also been rumors of a partial MacOS fix deployed with version 10.13.2, although the extent of the changes remains unclear. Apple did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
It’s also unclear how the various patches will affect processor performance. Some estimates for some Linux-based systems ranged as high as seventeen percent, although tests of other applications saw little to no effect. Nevertheless, the early impact appears significant, with slowdowns depending largely on the workload of the given device.
from The Verge - All Posts http://ift.tt/2lS2FwD
The Cyber Hacker - website covers tutorials on cyber security, latest tech news, Linux & Ubuntu, programming, internet & computer hacking, how to guides, safety guides, and fixes to every day computer/internet problems. Enjoy Learning with The Cyber Hacker!
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon