News

Intel CEO Details Patch Plans for Meltdown and Spectre Security Flaws

All Intel chips released in the past five years will receive security patches for the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities by the end of January.

That's according to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, speaking at a Monday night keynote to kick off the CES industry conference in Las Vegas.

"For our processors and products introduced in the past five years, Intel expects to issue updates for more than 90 percent of them within a week, and the remaining by the end of January," Krzanich said.

Facing by far the biggest security crisis since he took over as CEO in May 2013, Krzanich used the first two minutes of the keynote to discuss the security issues before pivoting to a more standard, future-oriented keynote focused on Intel's technologies for artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Reports emerged last week that Intel and its hardware, operating system and other industry partners were working on patches for a major vulnerability in processors that could allow an attacker to collect sensitive data from computing devices that were working as designed. Intel confirmed and elaborated on the vulnerabilities in a series of public statements last week.

As he thanked industry partners for their speed and effort to release patches, Krzanich showed a slide with statements from those companies about how systems had already been patched. One statement on the slide from Amazon noted, "This is a vulnerability that has existed for more than 20 years in modern processor architectures like Intel, AMD, and ARM across servers, desktops, and mobile devices."

Krzanich's comments Monday did not address whether Intel planned to release updates for products that were more than 5 years old.

His CES comments were also less emphatic than Intel's public statements from last week in downplaying the possibility of performance hits from the patches, although that lack of emphasis could have been simply an effort to get on with the main keynote.

"We believe the performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent. Now as a result, we expect some workloads may have a larger impact than others so we'll continue working with the industry to minimize the impact on those workloads over time," Krzanich said Monday.

Previous Intel statements had added that the performance impact for the average computer user "should not be significant," and the company also released partner statements from Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google describing the impact with words like "not...meaningful," "not...noticeable," "no measurable reduction" and "negligible impact."

Krzanich encouraged users to apply updates as soon as they become available, and said the exploits don't appear to have been used maliciously yet. "As of now we have not received any information that these exploits have been used to obtain customer data, and we're working tirelessly on these issues to ensure it stays that way," he said.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

Featured

  • Microsoft Appoints Althoff as New CEO for Commercial Business

    Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella on Wednesday announced the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of the company's commercial business, presenting the move as a response to the dramatic industrywide shifts caused by AI.

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

  • Closeup of the new Copilot keyboard key

    Microsoft Updates Copilot To Add Context-Sensitive Agents to Teams, SharePoint

    Microsoft has rolled out a new public preview for collaborative "always on" agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing enhanced, context-aware tools into Teams channels, meetings, SharePoint sites, Planner workstreams and Viva Engage communities.

  • Windows 365 Cloud Apps Now Available for Public Preview

    Microsoft announced this week that Windows 365 Cloud Apps are now available for public preview. This aims to allow IT administrators to stream individual Windows applications from the cloud, removing the need to assign Cloud PCs to every user.