When news of Spectre and Meltdown first leaked out in early January, Intel’s (INTC) stock took a hit, as investors feared the security problems might slow chip sales. “This is going to be an ongoing activity probably for many of us.” “We know this isn’t the end of the story,” Singhal adds. “You’re going to see a constant progression–that’s what this team will be thinking about.” The focus will be on uncovering future vulnerabilities, but also thinking about how to make its chips more secure in general. “This was going to be a whole new area of research and a whole new area of security understanding that required a long-term investment by Intel,” Krzanich says. Longtime Intel executive Leslie Culbertson, who joined the company in 1979, heads the IPAS group. Intel’s New Security EffortĪs a result of the experience, Intel CEO Krzanich set up a new group, dubbed the IPAS or Intel Product Assurance and Security, to not only work on the Spectre and Meltdown fixes but to address future security problems more effectively. But Microsoft (MSFT) warned that PCs running its older Windows 7 or 8 and Intel’s five-year-old Haswell processors would take a big hit. One test on a PC with a Kaby Lake Core i7 processor found most apps slowed less than 10%, which would be barely noticeable in real life usage. The hit varied widely depending on the type of Intel chip involved and the programs being run. The software patches had a cost in reducing the performance of the affected CPUs. With people in different time zones working on the problem, the effort could operate around the clock.Īll along, the plan was to issue software fixes first and then build the protections into future chip designs. Singhal held a daily morning conference call, sometimes lasting for two hours, to coordinate Intel’s response across offices in Oregon, California, Texas, and Israel. Researchers at a special security vulnerability search team at Google reported to Intel’s security section in June that they’d uncovered a problem with a key part of CPU design.īy early July, Intel and other chipmakers had realized the vast scope of the problem and convened groups to craft solutions. The whole mess that revealed such serious security vulnerabilities in nearly every chip made for the past few decades, by Intel and its competitors, started small last summer. “We’ve got everything five years and newer completed and we’re now starting to implement hardware mitigations where it’s actually built into our silicon.” Spectre and Meltdown Variants 1, 2, and 3 “We’ve made it through the first set of software mitigations,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich tells Fortune. The revamped chip designs will be ready for 8th generation Core processors released in the second half of the year and a line of Xeon server chips expected in the fourth quarter known by the code name “ Cascade Lake.” Building the protections into the hardware eliminates a significant amount of the impact on performance seen with the software patches, Singhal says. Up next for Singhal are fixes that will be embedded directly in the silicon of upcoming products. Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter. On Thursday, Intel declared that it had fully deployed patches covering all of the chips it had made in the past five years. He did get to join the party and eat a dish of Helena’s famed calamari.Ī few weeks later, Intel issued corrected patches and the fixes for one of the most serious security incidents in computing history have gone smoothly since then. “They thought I’d gotten lost or kidnapped or something,” he jokes recalling the incident. It took more than an hour to assuage the contractor-Singhal’s co-workers started eating without him. Relying on some techniques that Intel had never used previously in its software, “there were cases where the patches didn’t work as intended,” Singhal explained. (And even stirred Linux creator Linus Torvalds to publicly proclaim Intel’s work was “pure garbage.”) Though only affecting a tiny proportion of the market, the problems were widespread enough to spook PC makers and prompt a temporary recall of the updated software. Among all the millions and millions of computers in use around the world running Intel CPUs, one of the patches for Spectre was causing some computers to freeze up or spontaneously reboot. The problem that night for Singhal, who oversees the development of the architecture for all of Intel’s processors, was that something was wrong with the patches.
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