Intel CEO: New Products that Tackle Meltdown, Spectre Threats Coming this Year

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told analysts in the company's earnings call yesterday that Intel will unveil new products "later this year" that mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.

"Our near term focus is on delivering high quality mitigations to protect our customers infrastructure from these exploits. We're working to incorporate silicon-based changes to future products that will directly address the Spectre and Meltdown threats in hardware. And those products will begin appearing later this year," Krzanich said. 

Intel has been under fire in the wake of recently discovered Meltdown and Spectre  hardware vulnerabilities in most of its modern processors, which allow for so-called side-channel attacks. With Meltdown, sensitive information in the kernel memory is at risk of being accessed nefariously; with Spectre, a user application could read the kernel memory as well as that of another application. The end result: an attacker could read sensitive system memory containing passwords, encryption keys, and emails — and use that information to help craft a local attack.

In a post early this week, Intel called for customers and OEMs to halt installation of patches for its Broadwell and Haswell microprocessors after widespread reports of spontaneous rebooting of systems affixed with the new patches. Intel said it plans to issue a fix for the Meltdown-Spectre vulnerabilites.

Meanwhile, Krzanich told analysts on the earnings call: "Security has always been a priority for us and these events reinforce our continuous mission to develop the world's most secured products. This will be an ongoing journey, but we're committed to the task and I'm confident we’re up to the challenge. To keep you informed, we've created a dedicated website and we're approaching this work with customer-first urgency. I've assigned some of the very best minds at Intel to work through this and we're making progress." 

Read more here and from an exerpt from the call transcript, here.