AMD Addresses Meltdown, Spectre Issues; Security Patches To Be Released
Advanced Micro Devices recently addressed its customers affected with the Meltdown and Spectre CPU security flaws and promised to issue necessary updates.
In the early days of 2018, security researchers revealed their findings that a massive number of CPUs had been exposed to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. To resolve the issue, software and operating system developers are working with chip makers in coming up with a fix.
AMD recently issued a statement to clarify how these vulnerabilities actually affect its consumers. It also explained what people need to do to keep the sensitive data stored on their computers from being compromised.
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In the course of their study, the researchers identified three variants of the security flaws, and AMD shared which among these vulnerabilities actually affected the company's products. It confirmed that the first (Bounds Check Bypass) and second (Branch Target Injection) variants were "applicable to AMD processors."
AMD also said that the Bounds Check Bypass issue "can be contained with an operating system (OS) patch," and the company confirmed that it was working with Microsoft to contain the issue on computers running on Windows operating systems.
Microsoft needed to temporarily suspend issuing security updates recently, especially for those with AMD chips, after it found that these patches were not compatible with antivirus software that kept affected computers from restarting after patch installation.
According to Microsoft, it has now "resumed updating the majority of AMD devices" but the updates' release remained suspended for "a small subset of older AMD processors" such as the AMD Opteron, Athlon, and AMD Turion X2 Ultra.
While AMD confirmed that the Branch Target Injection is also applicable to its CPUs, the company clarified that the architecture of its chips will "make it difficult to exploit." However, the chip manufacturer will still work on a fix for the issue.
"We have defined additional steps through a combination of processor microcode updates and OS patches that we will make available to AMD customers and partners to further mitigate the threat," the company further explained.
As with the case of Nvidia GPUs, AMD clarified that these security flaws have not had an effect on its own GPU products.
