Vulnerabilities

Intel Halts Spectre, Meltdown CPU Patches Over Unstable Code

Intel on Monday said that users should stop deploying patches for the “Spectre” and “Meltdown” chip vulnerabilities disclosed by researchers earlier this month, saying the patches could cause problems in affected devices, including higher than expected reboots and other “unpredictable” system behavior.

Mike Lennon

January 22, 2018

The US chip giant recommended that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions of the patches.

“We have now identified the root cause of the reboot issue impacting Broadwell and Haswell platforms, and made good progress in developing a solution to address it,” Navin Shenoy, Intel data center group executive vice president, wrote in security update.

“We ask that our industry partners focus efforts on testing early versions of the updated solution so we can accelerate its release,” Shenoy added.

Last Wednesday, Intel shared information on the performance impact of the inital Meltdown and Spectre patches on data centers, and the company did warn customers that systems with several types of processors may experience more frequent reboots after firmware updates are installed.

Shenoy said that Intel expects to share more details on the timing of new patches later this week.

As technology firms rush out fixes to address the security risks, many of the updates have turned out to be unstable.

Red Hat has also decided to pull microcode patches for one variant of the Spectre exploit after users complained that updates had caused their systems to stop booting.

The updates initially released by Microsoft caused some systems using AMD processors to stop booting. Some systems running Ubuntu also failed to boot after Canonical’s first round of updates was installed.

Several industrial control systems (ICS) vendors have advised customers not to apply them before conducting thorough tests.

VMware also decided to delay new releases of microcode updates until Intel addresses these problems.

Written By Mike Lennon

For more than 10 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.

Latest News

Click to comment

Dealing With the Carcinization of Security

Varied viewpoints as related security concepts take on similar traits create substantial confusion among security teams trying to evaluate and purchase security technologies.

Marc Solomon

Stop, Collaborate and Listen: Disrupting Cybercrime Networks Requires Private-Public Cooperation and Information Sharing

No one combatting cybercrime knows everything, but everyone in the battle has some intelligence to contribute to the larger knowledge base.

Derek Manky

How the Atomized Network Changed Enterprise Protection

Our networks have become atomized which, for starters, means they’re highly dispersed. Not just in terms of the infrastructure – legacy, on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge.

Matt Wilson

Mapping Threat Intelligence to the NIST Compliance Framework Part 2

How threat intelligence is critical when justifying budget for GRC personnel, and for threat intelligence, incident response, security operations and CISO buyers.

Landon Winkelvoss

Password Dependency: How to Break the Cycle

Hackers rarely hack in anymore. They log in using stolen, weak, default, or otherwise compromised credentials. That’s why it’s so critical to break the password dependency cycle. But how can this be done?

Torsten George