Intel will release CPUs this year that are hardware protected against SpectreSpec

Intel will release new processor series in the second half of the year that provide hardware protection against abuse of the second variant of the Specter vulnerability and against Meltdown.

Intel has announced that its Intel Xeon Scalable processors, codenamed Cascade Lake, or Skylake-E/X’s 14nm refresh, offer hardware protection. In addition, the 8th generation Core processors that will be released in the second half of 2018 are resistant to Specter variant 2 and Meltdown. It is not yet clear which Core processors are involved, because Intel is dropping series with different code names under the 8th generation. For the first variant of Specter, the protection remains software-based for the time being.

Intel has not yet published details about the hardware protection, but it is clear that the company provides shielding, the company speaks of ‘partitioning’, so that ‘cheating’ with speculative processing becomes impossible. The speculative operation capability of modern processors formed the basis of Specter and Meltdown because the cache allowed attackers to see what values ​​were being loaded speculatively. Intel probably better shields the cache where processors temporarily store used data.

In addition, Intel reports having released protective microcode for all processors of the past five years, in practice the Sandy Bridge and newer generations. Microsoft is distributing microcode patches through Windows Update, but the most recent update, KB4090007, is only available through the Microsoft Update Catalog.