The last couple of days have been frantic for the tech community. Ever since Google released two documents detailing the security flaws in almost every CPU in the world right now, the consumers have patiently waited for a fix for their devices. Some, however, have decided to take matters into their own hands. Owners of Intel-based CPUs in Oregon, California and Indiana have sued Intel over the security flaws that have been highlighted in its chipset.
They claim that the vulnerability in the chipset, which Intel learned about several months ago, make its chips inherently faulty. Intel has provided security patches ever since, but, the complaints raise concerns that these [...]
A couple of days ago, Google along with a few other security researchers conceded that almost all the CPUs currently functioning across the world are susceptible to a major security breach. The company released two white papers chronicling the two main ways through which the CPUs can be affected, called Meltdown and Spectre.
It now appears that Google has a fix for this flaw and it might not cause a significant slowdown as well. In a blog post, Google said that it has shared a new fix, called Retpoline which fixes one of the Spectre vulnerabilities (CVE-2017-5715). Along with that, the company also deployed a Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) fix that protects against the [...]
Alphabet’s Google, along with a few other security researchers published a document which chronicled two major flaws found in nearly all modern CPUs. The reason this flaw is much more complex than the usual software or hardware bugs is that it’s more than just a bug that can be fixed with an update. The flaw lies in the middle, at the level of the processors’ “architectures,” in the way all the millions of transistors and logic units work together to carry out tasks.
In the architecture of modern CPUs, there are unpenetrable spaces where data passes through in raw, unencrypted form, such as inside the kernel, the most central software unit, or in system memory [...]
